And so at last, I found myself staring into space, with my little glass-bottomed boat in my hand, looking forward and looking to the past, thinking about how far I’d come since I was first stuck in Sodom and Gomorrah and how the endless voyage was going to end very soon. My long moment of reading Proust had itself become a Proustian moment, a

But here too I found compensations. If I could remember a phrase or even a word of the passage I wanted to go back to, I could search for it. Even better, I could send myself a message in a bottle and cast it out into the night. That is, when I came to a phrase I knew I would want to return to later, I could highlight it on my phone and paste it

Finally, in the fall, shortly before my father turned 95, I began where I left off, in Sodom and Gomorrah , reading Proust on my cellphone at night when everyone else in the house had gone to sleep.

Marcel Proust (1871–1922) at about 20 (Corbis)

When I tell people this, they look at me like I have drowned a kitten. And when I tell them that not only

Finally, in the fall, shortly before my father turned 95, I began where I left off, in Sodom and Gomorrah , reading Proust on my cellphone at night when everyone else in the house had gone to sleep.

It was strange to pick up these postcards in the morning, to see passages of Proust scattered in with the headlines, the ordinary news from friends, and the junk mail. On the morning of November 20, 2011, I was delighted to see that I had a postcard from Proust. I opened it up. It was a tidbit I’d sent myself the night before from his fifth volume,