12 February

Today's Proust. Social life, society. Proust saw social life as both important, and as the shallowest of all human experiences. For Proust all of life is an apprenticeship to 'signs', signs of love, of art, of social life etc. Each of these areas of life have something to teach us, and we don't grow up until we have learned what the signs are saying to us, in each of these areas of life. Social signs teach us that social life is based on comparison - on comparing ourselves with others - and that while this is important, it's also essentially empty. Being social does not force any real change in us, unlike something like love, which turns our entire universe upside down and forces us to encounter something different to ourselves.