Triumph of the spirit …

… Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

And as he digs more deeply into À la recherche

du temps perdu something miraculous happens.

The huge chasm between the affluent Parisian man

of the world Marcel Proust and the incarcerated Polish prisoners begins to

narrow. Proust, after all, may have gained renown as a witty and charming

presence in the salons of his day, but when he embarked in earnest on his

career as a novelist, he renounced this fashionable world and isolated himself

to an almost pathological degree. Not only did he rarely leave his home, but he

sequestered himself even more tightly in his bedroom, where he had the walls

lined with cork to prevent sounds and pathogens entering from the outside.

The analogy of a prisoner in an isolation cell comes immediately to mind.