The Art of Tetman Callis Lit & Crit It’s out there somewhere, keep looking

It’s out there somewhere, keep looking

“Everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in some former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body…. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there.” – Marcel Proust, The Captive (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)

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