Proust is now as far from us in time as the early Romantics were from the generation of Shaw and Wells. Yet he continues to be loved; his work has not petrified into the intimidating mesas, the scarcely scalable volcanic cones, which time and lessening literacy have made of Joyce, Musil, Mann, and even Kafka, who left his more ambitious works uncompleted. These vintage modernists, so bold and fresh in their lifetimes, have taken on the nature of assignments, to be worked through as the classic Greek and Latin texts were for earlier generations of the educated. But Proust remains as light and inviting as a feather bed, a nearly infinite mass of prose gently sighing up and down, like a calm sea glinting with myriad coins of moonlight. A young correspondent of mine wrote that he had just begun to read Proust; he likened it to a first date, and said it made him feel shy. The novelist Mary Gordon, I recently read, begins her writing day by reading ten pages of Proust, somewhat the way Karl Barth used to play a Mozart recording before settling to theology. While we may have trouble remembering where we were when we first opened “Ulysses” or “The Castle,” most of us can recall when we first began to read “Remembrance of Things Past.”

— The Man in Bed BY JOHN UPDIKE