Tao Te Ching

“a man who had spent the last 14 years lying in a narrow bed under a pile of thinly woven woolen blankets writing an unusually long novel without an adequate bedside lamp…. his friends were almost unanimous in suggesting that Proust had been a paragon of companionship, an embodiment of friendship’s every virtue.”

— Alain de Botton 1969 CE –
Philosophic link between ancient wisdom and modern challenge
from How Proust Can Change Your Life, 1997