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Proust wrote exclusively in bed, lying with his body almost completely horizontal and his head propped up by two pillows. To reach the exercise book resting on his lap, he had to lean awkwardly on one elbow, and his only working light was a weak, green-shaded bedside lamp. Thus any substantial period of work left his wrist cramped and his eyes exhausted. “After ten pages I am shattered,” he wrote. If he felt too tired to concentrate, Proust would take a caffeine tablet, and when he was finally ready to sleep, he would counteract the caffeine with Veronal, a barbital sedative. “You’re putting your foot on the brakes and the accelerator at the same time,” a friend warned him. Proust didn’t care-if anything, he seemed to need the work to be painful. He thought suffering had value, and that it was the root of great art. As he wrote in the final volume of Remembrance of Things Past, “it almost seems as though a writer’s works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his heart.
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