Last night Mark and I went to see the movie "Bruno". It was outrageous and hilarious and delightfully politically incorrect. In text-message lingo I could say "lol" but I don't know if it means "laughed out loud" or "lots of laughs". Either I guess. Both.
I came home. I fell into bed. I randomly opened the Walter Benjamin book: Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings.
Apropos of what I quoted from Marcel Proust and Orhan Pamuk the other day regarding the memoirist's accuracy, I came upon this in Benjamin's essay "A Berlin Chronicle":
What Proust began so playfully became awesomely serious. He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments; no image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside; that image, that taste, that touch for whose sake all this has been unfurled and dissected; and now remembrance advances from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows ever mightier. Such is the deadly game that Proust began so dilettantishly, in which he will hardly find more successors than he needed companions.
Intellectually ill-equipped for such depths of thought I fell asleep.
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