[...] Proust’s creature are victims, then, of this predominating condition and circumstance - Time; victims as lower organisms, conscious only of two dimensions and suddenly confronted with the mystery of height, are victims, victims and prisoners. There is no escape from the hours and the days. Neither tomorrow nor yesterday. There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. The mood is of no importance. Deformation has taken place. Yesterday was not a milestone that has passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous. We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday. A calamitous day, but calamitous not necessarily in content. The good and evil disposition of the object has neither reality nor significance. The immediate joys and sorrows of the body and the intelligence are so many superfoetations. Such as it was, it has been assimilated to the only world that has reality and significance, the world of our latent consciousness, and its cosmography has suffered a dislocation. So that we are rather in the position of Tantalus [13]

The laws of memory are subject to the more general laws of habit. Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, 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, as Schopenhauer 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 countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitutes the individual and their countless correlative objects. The periods of transition that separate consecutive adapt[at]ions (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. [19]

Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned. Friendship implies an almost piteous acceptance of face values. Friendship is a social expedient, like upholstery or the distribution of garbage buckets. It has no spiritual [63] significance. For the artist, who does not deal in surfaces, the rejection of friendship is not only reasonable, but a necessity. ... Proust situates friendship somewhere between [64] fatigue and ennui. [65]; The only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contract of the spirit, a descent. The artist is active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extracircumferential phenomena, drawn to the core of the eddy. He cannot practise friendship, because friendship is the centrifugal force of self-fear, self-negation. [65-66]

‘The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, together with the obligation to express’ (p.103); ‘My case, since I am in the dock, is that van Velde is the first to desist from this estheticised automatism, the first to submit wholly to the incoercible absence of relation, in the absence of terms or, if you like, in the presence of unavailable terms, the first to admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.’ (Rep. in Ruby Cohn, ed, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, London: John Calder 1983, pp.138-45; p.126.)