Rainbow, Kaka Point

"...it is on the morning when he is going out to fight a duel in particularly dangerous circumstances that, when he is perhaps on the point of losing it, he suddenly becomes aware of the value of a life which he might have used to establish a body of work, or simply to enjoy himself, and of which he has made no use at all. 'Only let me not be killed,' he says to himself, 'and see how I shall work, starting this minute, and how I shall enjoy life!' Life suddenly seems more valuable to him, because he has included in it everything it might be able to give, and not the small amount that he usually makes it give to him. He sees it through the eyes of desire and not as what experience has shown him he can make of it, that is, something so very commonplace. It has, in an instant, been filled with work, travel, mountain-climbing, all the fine things that he thinks the dreadful outcome of this duel may make impossible for him, without realizing that they were already impossible long before the duel was thought of, because of his bad habits which, even without the duel, would have continued. He comes home without a scratch. But he goes on finding the same objections to pleasures, to outings, to journeys, to everything of which he feared for a moment being deprived by death; life is enough to cut him off from them. As far as work is concerned — since extreme circumstances exaggerate what was already present in a man, diligence in the hard worker and laziness in the idler — he awards himself a holiday." — Proust, The Prisoner

May 14th

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