"Reading Proust is like bathing in someone else's dirty water."-Alexander Woollcott

"His father died in 1903 and his mother in 1905. After the deaths of his parents he increasingly withdrew from social life and he became a virtual recluse, spending most of his time in bed writing, in a room lined with cork to exclude noise, with all the windows shut and the air thick with inhalents. His friends were usually summoned to visit him at night. After 1907 he lived mainly in a cork-lined room in his apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann, writing mostly at night. His last public appearance was at the New Year's Eve ball given by the discreetly homosexual Comte de Beaumont in 1921."


Proust's multifaceted vision is enthralling. He was a satirist and a nanoscopic analyst of introspective consciousness, a chronicler and theorist of Eros, exploring nuances of human sexuality, a wise and ethical writer. He was the creator of more than forty unforgettable characters who continue to resonate in the world's literary consciousness. Above all, Proust's central message is the affirmation of life. Contrary to the opinion voiced by some of his contemporaries and critics, Proust's great work teaches that life's "purpose" is not to be sought in artistic artefacts: life is not fulfilled when a painting or a novel is completed, but when it is transmuted, in the very course of quotidian living, into something "artistic" or spiritually mature and wise.


 "Reading Proust is like bathing in someone else's dirty water."-Alexander Woollcott


When I was around 6 I was sent to a boarding school in East Sussex and I was one of three small girls. The rest were boys. Bath time happened once a week on a Saturday.
We were all lined up naked from the bathroom, on the landing and down the first and second flight of stairs. There must have been 50 of us, maybe less. In any case we were lined up alphabetically, each week the same order. Because of my surname starting with a P I was way down the queue. 
The bathtub was filled half-way with water and every child was bathed in the same water in the same tub three at a time! Three at a time! Scrub scrub scrub. The matron would use the same flannel and wipe our faces and ears, ask us to soap ourselves and then rinse us with a beaker of water which by this time pretty cold water!
By the time I climbed in with two boys on either side the water was quite dirty and cool! Memorable colour and memorable water!
I was next to a kid who used to gross me out, poor thing! He would spit when he talked and had a gravelly voice. He wanted to trade all the time. Sweets for treats! He would get a great tuck box every term filled with Mars bars and such.


Is this my Madeleine experience? What is the trigger? Dishwater?