Marcel Proust ($1871-1922$) was immensely well read. 'In Search of Lost Time’ encapsulates within itself the main traditions in French literature: both in Fiction (from Madame de Lafayette through Stendhal, Balzac. Flaubert and Zola) and in the bellelettristic-philosophical line (from Montaigne through Pascal, La Rochefoucauld and Chamfort). Proust formed a strong long taste for generalization through these latter writers, I own a small book of his maxims, drawn from the novel and his discursive writings, and an unusually high quotient of them are dazzling. Let one example suffice: "It has been said that the greatest praise of God lies in the negation of the atheist, who considers creation sufficiently perfect to dispense with a creator.”
As an asthmatic child, Proust read more than most children. By the age of $15,$ he was already immersed in contemporary literature, having read the essays and novels of Anatole France and Pierre Loti, the poetry of Mallarme and Leconte de Lisle, and a number of the novels or Dostoyevsky, Tolsloy. Dickens and George Eliot. Unlike Henry James, who referred to their works as “baggy monsters," Proust fully appreciated the great Russian novelists. He thought Tolstoy “a serene god", valuing especially his ability to generalize in the form of setting down laws about human nature. For Proust, Dostoyevsky surpassed all other writers, and he found "The Idiot" the most beautiful novel he had ever read. He admired Dostoyesky's skill with sudden twists in plot, providing the plausible surprises that propelled his novels.
In his $1905$ essay 'On Reading,' a key document in Proust's freeing himself to write his great novel, he quoted Descartes: “The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the most cultivated of men of past centuries who have been their authors." Proust's examination of 'the original psychological act called "reading", that "noblest of distractions." He stated that reading is superior to conversation, which 'dissipates immediately."
A book, he felt, is "a friendship... and the fact that it is directed to one who is absent, gives it something disinterested, almost moving." Books are actually better than friends, Proust thought, because you turn to there only when you truly desire their company and can ignore them when you wish, neither of which is true of a friend. One also frequently loves people in books, “to whom one had given more of ones attention and tenderness [than] to people in real life." In his own novel, Proust wrote “Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated – the only life in consequence which can be said to be really lived — is literature."
The passage implies that Proust subscribes to which of the following views?
- Reading a good book is like having a conversation with a classical writer.
- Reading is a virtuous pastime and it leaves an indelible impression on one's mind.
- Literature imitates life.
- A reader can invest in the feelings for characters in a book.
- Dosloyevsky's “The Idiot" was appreciated by him for the unanticipated turns in the plot.
- Dosloyevsky's “The Idiot" was known for its aesthetics its gripping pace and its unlikely element of surprise.
- $\text{a,c,d,e}$
- $\text{a,e,f}$
- $\text{a,b,c,e}$
- $\text{a,b,c,d,e}$