Beckett wrote Proust in the summer of 1930, in response to a commission precipitated by Thomas MacGreevy, Charles Prentice, and Richard Aldington, during his stay at the École normale in Paris.
The essay serves double duty as its author's aesthetic and epistemological manifesto, proclaiming on behalf of its ostensible subject: "We cannot know and we cannot be known".
The periods of transition that separate consecutive adaptations (because by no expedient of macabre transubstantiation can the grave-sheets serve as swaddling-clothes) represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being (at this point, and with a heavy heart and for the satisfaction or disgruntlement of Gideans, semi and integral, I am inspired to concede a brief parenthesis to all the analogivorous, who are capable of interpreting the 'Live dangerously', that victorious hiccough in vacuo, as the national anthem of the true ego exiled in habit.
There is no right and wrong in Proust nor in his world (except possibly in those passages dealing with the war, when for a space he ceases to be an artist and raises his voice with the plebs, mob, rabble, canaille).
'Pues el delito mayorDel hombre es haber nacido'.The final quotation is from Pedro Calderón de la Barca's La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream), and "soci malorum" is a quotation from Arthur Schopenhauer's Studies in Pessimism:[1] In fact, the conviction that the world and man is something that had better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another.