Temporizing

Proust's novel is about a man who looks back to a time when all he did was look forward to better times.  To rephrase this somewhat: he looks back to a time when what he looked forward to was perhaps nothing more than sitting down and writing ... and therefore looking back.

--André Aciman, "Temporizing," Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

This quotation from Aciman -- a Proustian scholar and enthusiast -- summing up Proust's magnum opus, may explain why I am still only 40 percent of the way through the first of the seven volumes that make up À la recherche du temps perdu.