Proust is a great teacher. This may sound embarrassingly platitudinous, and yet I find that it is a fact altogether too easily overlooked in our incessant praise (or bemoaning) of his technical

Proust is a great teacher. This may sound embarrassingly platitudinous, and yet I find that it is a fact altogether too easily overlooked in our incessant praise (or bemoaning) of his technical achievements as a stylistic innovator. Setting aside for a while the whole issue of innovative narrative technique (which is nonetheless essential to the realization of his thought through literary art), we can appreciate that he has something important to teach us about what it means to be wise, or, in short, a more fully realized human being.