I wrote this book on freezing winter days and nights in Shanghai. I think its pages carry some of the urgency of that time and place, which is undergoing so much change and uncertainty—as we all are, whether city-bound or not.
In those chapters of this book where I discuss the writing of Marcel Proust, I have used some long quotations interwoven with my own writing. This is a stylistic device I found and liked in the work of the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel in his lectures on the German poet Rilke. The stylistic device served there to introduce the readers (or listeners, as they would have been originally) to Rilke in a substantial, first-hand way, and at the same time to provide some insight into a text which may otherwise have seemed rather arcane or difficult: Rilke is not an easy poet who you can just pick up and read and understand, without first sharing something of his sensibility. The stylistic device allows for both the reading of the poet (or Proust, in my case) and some orientation as to the sensibility required for admiration and understanding.