Coming to terms: a journal in parts

Propitious that I should find my way back to this book at a time like this, when the losses seem at their most, scattered at my feet like fallen leaves, demanding gathering. I am reading Swann's Way. In Search of Lost Time. Remembrance of Things Past. The former seems ever more apt. Lost time. Lost things. Losses. I have to pause, every now and then, as reading the book sometimes becomes painful. Sadness for lost things, for the ecstasy and the agony in the act--voluntary and involuntary--of remembering. We lose something everyday, I remember thinking, when Proust was recounting the episode of the tea and the petites madeleines. Man himself is a canvass of loss, an abyss whose depths hold so much light and darkness, impalpable, unfathomable.