‘Flushed with the glow of morning, her face was rosier than the sky. I felt on seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness.’ Proust has undoubtedly placed his finger on the very essence of the human problem. We keep on forgetting how delicious life can be, and allow ourselves to slip into a state of mind which it scarcely seems worth the effort. Proust says, ‘And we deliver on life a pessimistic judgement that we suppose to be accurate, for we believed that we were taking happiness and beauty into account, whereas in fact we had left them out and replaced them by syntheses in which there was not a single atom of either.’

- Colin Wilson (Beyond The Occult, p113)