Homage to Proust

The presence in a house, discarded casually - its navy blue marker ribbon straying, like a tiny river, away from it - on a table, or on the shelf of a conservatory, of a volume such as ‘A la Recherche du Temps Perdu’ attests, were it but the case that, in being there, it also attested to a reader in that house capable of appreciating it, to a presence, an intelligence in a neighbourhood, which is worthy of note; an intelligence so cultivated that one might be assured of its certain understanding of and resonance with the centuries of European history and refinement which conspired, so fruitfully, to underpin it.