"The irrevocability of time lost! The forfeiture of innocence through experience!"

Today is the birthday of Marcel Proust, author of the not-for-the-idly-curious À la recherche du temps perdu. The seven-part masterwork (the title was originally translated as Remembrance of Things Past and later more literally as In Search of Lost Time) occasioned one of the most monumentally magnificent editorial rejection letters in the history of Western publishing:

My dear fellow, I may be dead from the neck up, but rack my brains as I may I can't see why a chap should need thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep.

It also inspired this: