marcel proust as rising star

There are developments, trends -- I don't know quite what to call them -- that pique the interest because they don't quite make sense; they are culturally paradoxical. We could all see Survivor coming -- it's the perfect marriage of technological scopophilia and our growing appetite for real-life spectacle. But I would not have guessed, ever, that we should in the millennium year find ourselves in the middle of what looks like a Proust boomlet. …

… here was a work that one could self-administer as a drug; that the point of the immersion was less an insight into the mores and practices of a vanished societal microcosm, and much more a connection to an inwardness so powerful and insistent it reminds us that our dominant sense of life as a filofaxable array of tasks, appointments, and punctuated entertainments is a dream from which we might, with luck, one day awaken.