Remembrance of things past
by Marcel Proust · first published 1934
13% recommend78% neutral9% critical
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> I don't want to forget things. Ever. Again. Not strictly technology-related, but certainly human related, you might want to read Albert Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past". You might develop a new perspective on "remembering things" and memory after reading the book, a perspective not limited to technology or fancy gadgets but instead one that touches on our very essence…
on “Google Glass is Ridiculous” ↗…premise of the novel. I don't object to anyone handwaving away complexity in service of narrative. Virtually all authors do that. (Two exceptions that come to mind are Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.)
on “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet” ↗How to See Color and Paint It -- It taught me how to see color and paint it. Also how to use a palette knife which makes my paintings very different and fun. Remembrance of Things Past -- I'm still reading this, as it's a massive stream of consciousness book, but I wish I'd started it when I was younger so that I'd be done with it by now. It's just so weird to read it and experience…
on “Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?” ↗…tasting something or smelling something and suddenly you are wafted back to your youth and your mother's kitchen etc. This idea of course is probably related to Proust and À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) and its early scene of memory being sparked by a Madeleine. So I think the idea is pretty wide spread among people that food and smell works this way with memory, but does it really or do people just…
on “Ask HN: Does food evoke memory, or do you just think it does” ↗…after a 19th-century French cook named Madeleine Paumier, but it was the French author Marcel Proust who immortalized the pastry in his 1913 book Swann's Way, the first volume of his seven-part novel Remembrance of Things Past. In that work, a taste of tea-soaked cake evokes a surge of memory and nostalgia. As more and more readers chewed on the profound mnemonic power attributed to a mere morsel of cake, the word madeleine…
on “The Kingdom of the Dead: For post-Soviet people, Crimea was a gigantic madeleine” ↗I started listening to an audiobook of Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust with the best of intentions. It's high quality literature, and it unquestionably has artistic and human-ness value! However...it's become my "put this on with a 30 minute timer if I'm…
on “Marfa Public Radio Puts You to Sleep” ↗It's a reference to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, wherein he famously recounted how, upon eating a "dispiriting" madeline as an adult, he was abruptly and involuntarily taken back to the emotions of childhood, when he and an aunt shared madelines every…
on “The Kingdom of the Dead: For post-Soviet people, Crimea was a gigantic madeleine” ↗> it's like reading a description of a painting in book form. Interestingly, that's exactly how I would describe reading Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. It's very hard to read at first, until you can get into the rhythm of the thing. For example, here's one sentence: And so it was that, for a long time afterwards, when I lay awake at night and revived…
on “The Origins of the Linguistic Conception of Programming (2014) [pdf]” ↗Yeah, Proust definitely had a few things to say about the remembrance of things past :-D
on “UIs that accidentally preserve memories” ↗For the last couple years, I’ve set my reading goal on Goodreads to 1 book per year. Trying to read a certain number of books is meaningless. Reading Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is nothing like reading the latest 250-page blogpost-turned-popsci-selfhelp book. Don’t worry about how many books you read. Just read good books you like.
on “How to easily read 50 books a year” ↗…an event or earlier period in our lives. Many people report that this then links to a further array of memories. Nothing unusual about this. Proust famously described this in his extensive magnum opus 'Remembrance of Things Past' and so have many other authors to a lesser degree. So it's more than 'perhaps interesting'; there's plenty of circumstantial evidence that exposure to such chemicals might work to renew lapsed connections.
on “A Whiff of Genius: Simple Fragrance Method Boosts Cognitive Capacity by 226%” ↗Odd. I wasn't crazy about The Corrections, but it struck me as straightforward reading. Moby Dick, The Man Without Qualities, and Don Quixote are long, but to my notion very readable in a way that Remembrance of Things Past or The Golden Bowl are not.
on “Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books (2002)” ↗…to one book. I'm already beating it by 600%! Why create fake tasks to stress yourself out? Reading should be enjoyable, not a chore. And not all books are created equal. If you spend all year reading Remembrance of Things Past is that bad because you only read one book instead of reading 50 forgettable pop psychology business book of the month books? I don't think so.
on “Letting go of the idea of keeping up” ↗…literature can run into the absurd (sentences at half a page long), but even then there is a beauty to it. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin’s translation of Marcel Proust’s «In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past)» contains nearly half-page long sentences. Many modern readers complain about the substantial difficulty in following such sentences, although I personally find them delightful.
on “The great shift of English prose” ↗…Academia” in English. There’s no excuse for using some other title. You can always add alternative names to your indexing system—just like you might search for “In Search of Lost Time” and find a book titled “Remembrance of Things Past”—but the English translation would never be called “À la recherche du temps perdu”. That would be silly.
on “Pirate site traffic surges with help from manga boom” ↗