When I read today, I saw Proust in the text:

And what about little ___________ , with his blond curls and blue sash and shoes to match, but above all else, his obedient silence and his fixed stare? Deprived of toys he fondles the light glinting off a bunch of keys, is fascinated by the burl of the floorboards, counts the bricks of the houses opposite...

Of course, it's easy enough to laugh at ____________ . The most analytic mind in Europe did not even know how to frame an argument. The most analytic mind in Europe produced _____________ , a work soon to be known as one of the worst-organized books ever to earn the name of literature. Prolix, endlessly digressive, a mass of description, theories that trail off into inconclusiveness, volume after volume, a flood of internal contradiction.

Yet there's still the image of the child, with his physical passivity and his consuming, visual fire. I think of him squatting on the garden path, knees and arms akimbo, staring at ants swarming along the cracks between paving stones, fixating all that miniaturized activity into purest, linear ornament. It's the stare's relation to pattern, and its withdrawal from purpose. His boyish connection to the sea is just one more example of what we could only call the modernist vocation of this stare.

Listen to him saying, 'But before everything, at this time, came my pleasure in merely watching the sea. I was not allowed to row, far less to sail, nor to walk near the harbor alone; so that I learned nothing of shipping or anything else worth learning, but spent four or five hours every day in simply staring and wondering at the sea, - an occupation which never failed me till I was forty...'

Okay. Enough.

Now insert any modernist writer's name and work into the blanks provided. Does the description still fit?

When I read this passage today in Rosalind Krauss' The Optical Unconscious, I felt as though I were reading about someone I knew... Someone I engaged with on a very intimate level, someone who is only slightly alien for having lived at a different time than I, and through whom I am able to travel across centuries and listen to their dusty language.

RK was writing about John Ruskin, the famous 19th Century art critic. This discovery of the similarity between RK's description of Ruskin as a boy and Proust's Marcel in In Search of Lost Time left me thinking, could it be that Proust is not all that interesting after all? Is it possible that all modernismos are weird in the same way? They like to stare at things, they write indulgent, digressive and long books, solitude pleases them: Is Proust just a product of his time?

But no! There must be something different about him. Sure, autobiography and confessional narratives were majorly "in" at during the 19th and 20th century, but Proust goes beyond being "in" - he is the inversion of "in." I say this because even when everyone got bored of psychoanalysis and decided the author was dead, Proust ploughed through those Barthesian years without so much a moustache whisker out of place. His book, him, his book, him, his book are here to stay.

One last thing. Proust translated some of Ruskin's work. Now I'm really on to something.