Gopnik on James and Proust

Proceeding by contrast, one after another and back again.

Proust believes in evocations; James in implications. Proust is a confident generalizer, seeking on every page the rules of love, memory, and life. James is a simpler fact-seeker, registering in each paragraph the feeling of one experience after another. They are, in other words, a Frenchman and an American, the Frenchman a theorist with a totalizing bent, the American a skeptical empiricist, with a faith that one damn thing coming after another will eventually provide a whole.
Adam Gopnik "Little Henry, Happy At Last" The New Yorker

And so for day 1513
03.02.2011