Thursday, August 14, 2008

More Than One Way to See New Things

'The voyage of discovery is not about seeing new landscapes, it's about having new eyes.'
--Marcel Proust. To review earlier mentions of the languid Mr. Proust, you can go here, here and here.

4 Comments:

At 10:36 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Proust! Mon Dieu! He's one of the reasons why I didn't do better with 5 years of French in school! (Of course, I wish I'd taken Spanish, a language you can actually use.)

P.S. The Chesterton quote you ran reminds me of an executive years ago who complained about the negative results of an employee attitude survey: "Employees wouldn't think about how unhappy they are if we didn't keep asking them how they feel."

 
At 10:42 AM, Blogger John Ettorre said...

Interesting reaction to the quote, Mike. That made me laugh. And while I know a reasonable bit of Spanish (when in Italy I resort to about half Italian and half Spanish, or Italish) I sure wouldn't mind knowing French as well (fluently, as long as I get to choose).
For me, Proust is most memorable for my having tried but failed to read his absurdly long and languid opus, "Rememberance of Things Past" back in my early 20s when I had time (or rather made time) for that kind of thing. Better to have tried and failed than not to have tried at all, just like with the languages. Anyway, great to see your name back here in the comments, Mike. Since you also worked at JCU for a time, I'm wondering if you ever made it over to the library's Chesterton collection for at least a look.

 
At 10:48 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I was in there a few times, but never sensed the spirit of GK himself. What's interesting about the room is that it was dismantled from the old Severance estate (on the site of the shopping mall) and reconstructed in the JCU library.

 
At 2:21 AM, Blogger John Ettorre said...

Wow, never knew that about the tie to the Severance estate, Mike. That's doubly interesting in light of the fact that a writer friend, Diana Tittle, told me just a couple weeks ago that she's now at work on a book about Severance. Knowing her, it should be eminently worth reading.

 

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