We Neglect Recluses At Our Peril: Proust, Thoreau, and St Jerome in The Desert
In his prolonged solitude Marcel Proust created a new aesthetic out of tea biscuits, stewed chicken, twinges of jealousy, and found the most authentic thing about himself in that shadow world. Even in his tough Yankee pragmatism, Henry David Thoreau said “I have been thrilled to think that I owed a mental perception to the commonly gross sense of taste, that I have been inspired through the palate, that some berries which I had eaten on a hill-side had fed my genius.”
