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constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects. The periods of transition that separate consecutive adaptations (because by no expedient of macabre transubstantiation can the grave-sheets serve as swaddling-clothes) represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being (at this point, and with a heavy heart and for the satisfaction or disgruntlement of
Gideans, semi and integral, I am inspired to concede a brief parenthesis to all the analogivorous, who are capable of interpreting the 'Live dangerously', that victorious hiccough in vacuo, as the national anthem of the true ego exiled in habit. The Gideans advocate a habit of living—and look for an epithet. A nonsensical bastard phrase. An automatic adjustment of the human organism to the conditions of its existence has as little moral significance as the casting of a clout when May is or is not out; and the exhortation to cultivate a habit as little sense as an exhortation to cultivate a coryza). The suffering of being: that is, the free play of every faculty. Because the pernicious devotion of habit paralyses our attention, drugs those handmaidens of perception whose co-operation is not absolutely essential.
360:, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence. Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals; the world being a projection of the individual's consciousness (an objectivation of the individual's will,
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is not concerned with human justice. Tragedy is the statement of an expiation, but not the miserable expiation of a codified breach of a local arrangement, organised by the knaves for the fools. The tragic figure represents the expiation of original sin, of the original and eternal sin of him and all his 'soci malorum', the sin of having been born.
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Here, as always, Proust is completely detached from all moral considerations. There is no right and wrong in Proust nor in his world (except possibly in those passages dealing with the war, when for a space he ceases to be an artist and raises his voice with the plebs, mob, rabble, canaille). Tragedy
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would say), the pact must be continually renewed, the letter of safe-conduct brought up to date. The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day. Habit then is the generic term for the countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that
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In fact, the conviction that the world and man is something that had better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another. Nay, from this point of view, we might well consider the proper form of address to be, not
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my fellow-sufferer, Soci malorum, compagnon de miseres
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88:adding citations to reliable sources
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782:Quad I + II
669:Catastrophe
606:Come and Go
358:environment
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910:First Love
896:Assumption
768:Ghost Trio
753:Television
676:What Where
592:Happy Days
543:Eleutheria
441:References
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110:newspapers
39:improve it
878:How It Is
634:Footfalls
627:That Time
334:aesthetic
278:'s essay
186:talk page
45:talk page
1058:Disjecta
1033:Nohow On
945:Lessness
743:Cascando
346:CalderĂłn
1128:Notfilm
1082:Related
980:Company
966:neither
959:Fizzles
655:Rockaby
641:Neither
571:Endgame
528:Theatre
400:, and "
292:History
230:scholar
124:scholar
1096:(aunt)
1065:Proust
857:Molloy
836:Murphy
821:Novels
799:Screen
761:Eh Joe
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117:books
938:Ping
843:Watt
807:Film
599:Play
344:and
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