Hamlet, revised

Robert Saint-Loup has no interest in meeting M. and Mme Verdurin and company: “I find that kind of clerical circle exasperating,” he tells the narrator. Saint-Loup sees the Verdurins and company as “a small sect,” kind to those on the inside, contemptuous of everyone else. An apt comparision, as the Verdurins refer to their salon regulars as “the faithful.”

Listen to Saint-Loup, unnamed narrator:

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2005).

Anyone in academia has known such sects. They may be found in the ranks of both grad students and faculty. Sometimes they think of themselves not as a sect but as a “set.” I tend to call them “the anointed.” I never was one of them, nor was meant to be.

My friend Aldo Carrasco once mocked a grad school “set” in a letter: “They’re all too busy buying Entenmann’s cake for each other to read anything aloud.” Sometimes it was cookies.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[“Kind to those on the inside”: and even that’s not true. Ask M. Saniette.]