f we are prepared to refer simply to the facts . . . we shall see that Nature teaches us nothing, or practically nothing. . . . I ask you to scrutinize whatever is natural—all the actions and desires of the purely natural man: you will find nothing but frightfulness.  Everything beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.

h the power of this bitter-sweet god, as we call him in our unthinking way, and how truly he enslaves us, and with what little respect he treats us! Here is Andrés, a noble and intelligent young man, brought up almost all his life at court and spoiled by his rich parents, and all of a sudden he’s changed to the point of deceiving his servants and friends, disappointing the hopes which his parents had for him, leaving the road to Flanders, where he would have been able to put to use his bravery and increase the honour of his family, and throwing himself at the feet of a girl, to be her lackey—a girl who, beautiful as she was, was a gipsy after all. Oh, the privilege of beauty, which rides rough-shod over and drags even the most fancy-free along the ground by the hair!

ust is what connects the dreams of yesteryear with the touch of nowadays. It is the aftermath of the collapse of illusions, a powdery cloud that rises abruptly and then begins falling on things, gently covering their bright, polished surfaces. Dust is like a soft carpet of snow that gradually coats the city, quieting its noise until we feel like we are inside a snow globe, the urban exterior transmuted into a magical interior where all time is suspended and space contained. Dust makes the outside inside by calling attention to the surface of things, a surface formerly deemed untouchable or simply ignored as a conduit to what was considered real: that essence which supposedly lies inside people and things, waiting to be discovered. Dust turns things inside out by exposing their bodies as more than mere shells or carriers, for only after dust settles on an object do we begin to long for its lost splendor, realizing how much of this forgotten object's beauty lay in the more external, concrete aspect of its existence, rather than in its hidden, attributed meaning.
     Dust brings a little of the world into the enclosed quarters of objects. Belonging to the outside, the exterior, the street, dust constantly creeps into the sacred arena of private spaces as a reminder that there are no impermeable boundaries between life and death. It is a transparent veil that seduces with the promise of what lies behind it, which is never as good as the titillating offer. Dust makes palpable the elusive passing of time, the infinite pulverized particles that constitute its volatile matter catching their prey in a surprise embrace whose clingy hands, like an invisible net, leave no other mark than a delicate sheen of faint glitter. As it sticks to our fingertips, dust propels a vague state of retrospection, carrying us on its supple wings. A messenger of death, dust is the signature of lost time.

rifalconi shook his head.  In one of the attics in Château de la Muette he had found the remains of a table.  Its oval top, wonderfully inlaid with mother-of-pearl, was exceptionally well preserved; but its base, a massive, spindle-shaped column of grained wood, turned out to be completely worm-eaten.  The worms had done their work in covert, subterranean fashion, creating innumerable ducts and microscopic channels now filled with pulverized wood.  No sign of this insidious labor showed on the surface.  Grifalconi saw that the only way of preserving the original base—hollowed out as it was, it could no longer support the weight of the top—was to reinforce it from within; so once he had completely emptied the canals of their wood dust by suction, he set about injecting them with an almost liquid mixture of lead, alum, and asbestos fiber.  The operation was successful; but it quickly became apparent that, even thus strengthened, the base was too weak, and Grifalconi had to resign himself to replacing it.  It was after he had done this that he thought of dissolving what was left of the original wood so as to disclose the fabulous arborescence within, this exact record of the worms’ life inside the wooden mass: a static, mineral accumulation of all the movements that had constituted their blind existence, their undeviating single-mindedness, their obstinate itineraries; the faithful materialization of all they had eaten and digested as they forced from their dense surroundings the invisible elements needed for their survival, the explicit, visible, immeasurably disturbing image of the endless progressions that had reduced the hardest of woods to an impalpable network of crumbling galleries.

ying stiffly and askew . . . Marcel Proust would read to us, each night, Du Côté de Chez Swann.  These sessions added to the . . . disorder of the room a chaos of perspectives, for Proust would start anywhere, would mistake the page, confuse the passage, repeat himself, begin again, break off to explain that the lifting of a hat in the first chapter would reveal its significance in the last volume, and he would titter behind his gloved hand, with a laugh that he smeared all over his beard and cheeks.  “It’s too silly,” he kept saying, “no . . . I won’t read any more.  It’s too silly.”  His voice once more became a distant plaint, a tearful music of apologies, of courtesies, of remorse. . . . And when we had persuaded him to continue, he would stretch out his arm, pull no matter what page out of his scrawl and we would fall headlong into the Guermantes or the Verdurins household.  After fifty lines he would begin his performance all over again.  He would groan, titter, apologize for reading so badly.  Sometimes he would get up, take off a short jacket, run his hand through the inky locks that he used to cut himself and that hung down over his stretched collar.  He would go into a closet, where the livid light was recessed into the wall.  There one would catch sight of him standing up, in his shirt sleeves, a purple waistcoat on the torso of a mechanical toy, holding a plate in one hand, a fork in the other, eating noodles.

hen did I first notice that time “passed”?  The sense of time was not at first associated with the idea of death.  Of course, when I was four or five years old I realized that I should grow older and older and that I should die.  At about seven or eight, I said to myself that my mother would die some day and the thought terrified me.  However, I thought of it as a decisive interruption of the present, for everything was in the present.  A day, an hour, seemed to me long, limitless; I could see no end to it.  When they talked to me about next year I had the feeling that next year would never come.

he first thirty pages, said my father, turning over the leaves,—are a little dry; and as they are not closely connected with the subject,—for the present we’ll pass them by: ’tis a prefatory introduction, continued my father, or an introductory preface (for I am not determined which name to give it) upon political or civil government; the foundation of which being laid in the first conjunction betwixt male and female, for procreation of the species—I was insensibly led into it.—’Twas natural, said Yorick.

here is this possibility: after I tell you something, you just can’t believe it.  You can’t accept it.  You don’t like it.  A little screen comes down and you don’t listen anymore.  I’m going to describe to you how nature is—and if you don’t like it, that’s going to get in the way of your understanding it. . . . The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense.  And it agrees fully with experiment.  So I hope you can accept Nature as She is—absurd.

here is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.  Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street.  At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him.  Automatically, he slows down.  Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.
In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

very dream remains one by virtue of the fact that too little has succeeded, become finished for it.  That is why it cannot forget what is missing, why it holds the door open in all things.  The door that is at least half-open, when it appears to open onto pleasant objects, is marked hope.  Though, as we have seen, there is no hope without anxiety and no anxiety without hope, they keep each other hovering in the balance, no matter how far hope outweighs for the brave man, through the brave man.  However, hope too, which can deceive with will-o’-the-wisp, must be of a knowing kind, one that is thought out in advance.