Proust at length:
At daybreak, my face still turned to the wall, and before I had seen above the big inner curtains what tone the first streaks of light assumed, I could already tell what sort of day it was. The first sounds from the street had told me, according to whether they came to my ears dulled and distorted by the moisture of the atmosphere or quivering like arrows in the resonant and empty area of a spacious, crisply frozen, pure morning; as soon as I heard the rumble of the first tramcar, I could tell whether it was sodden with rain or setting forth into the blue. And perhaps these sounds had themselves been forestalled by some swifter and more pervasive emanation which, stealing into my slumber, diffused in it a melancholy that seemed to presage snow, or gave utterance (through the lips of a little person who occasionally reappeared there) to so many hymns to the glory of the sun that, having first of all begun to smile in my sleep, having prepared my eyes, behind their shut lids, to be dazzled, I awoke finally amid deafening strains of music.
Literature was the religion of the early 20th century, in the way that astrology and psychotherapy are the religions of today. From Nietzsche, via Bergson, and any number of Belle Epoch painters and composers, comes Proust—extracting the maximum possible of sensation from the minimum of experience, converting a few seconds of experience into a lexical and intellectual feast. Moncrieff’s translation is a little overwrought, but we get the general idea of Proust: life is only valuable once it has been translated into fiction.
The diary is sometimes interesting only because it, because of its very function, is forced to confess its own emptiness and pointlessness. The unwritten diary is much less interesting than the boring diary—the boring diary is really the most existentially profound iteration of the form.
The intellectual starvation diet. Having written very little of merit lately, I begin to question myself, lose trust in myself. Less and less, my instinct is to open up a notebook. I used to take notes constantly, now I check emails or texts; with each day, I’m more and more a manager or admin, and less and less an artist. I seem to have discovered that nothing comes from nothing; if the inputs approach zero, the outputs will approach zero.