[One Thousand Characters a Day] Proust's 'The Temporary Effect of Heartbreak'

Editor's NoteAsia Economy provides daily 1,000-character transcription content for readers of the 'One Day Ten Thousand Steps, One Day One Thousand Characters' newsletter. The transcription content is carefully selected according to themes on a daily and monthly basis from Eastern and Western classics, Korean literature, notable columns, and famous speeches. Today, we introduce a part of "The Temporary Effect of Heartbreak" from Colors of Time: A Reverie, a collection of early prose poems by the great French writer Marcel Proust. The text contains 1,063 characters.

Let us be grateful to those who bring us happiness. They are the wonderful gardeners who make our souls bloom. But those to whom we owe even greater thanks are the women who treated us with indifference or cruelty, or the cruel friends who wounded our hearts. They shattered our feelings into pieces and left them desolate. Like a harsh wind that may not guarantee a harvest but scattered a few good seeds, they uprooted us entirely, even cutting off the smallest branches.

Destroying all the small happinesses that concealed great misfortunes, turning our hearts into a gloomy and barren wilderness, they urge us to look within ourselves and reflect. Sad dramas offer us a similar charity. Unlike comedies, which merely distract us temporarily by satisfying our hunger, tragedies are superior to mere entertaining works. The bread that nurtures humanity is bitter in taste. When life is satisfying, human fate does not reveal itself as it is, because interests obscure it or desires distort it. However, when we are dazed by pain in daily life or immersed in solemn emotions at the theater, not only the fate of the characters but also our own fate compels us to listen to eternal words of duty and truth that we have never heard before. True tragedy speaks to us in the tone of those who writhe in suffering (those who suffer lay down all burdens there and simply insist we listen).

Ah! Emotions are fickle and take back what they once gave; though sorrow is nobler than joy, its effect does not last. When morning comes, we completely forget the tragedy that so uplifted us the night before, enabling us to view our lives with insight and genuine compassion. Perhaps only after a full year can we console a betrayal by a woman or the death of a friend. While dreams shatter and withered happiness scatters, and tears fall like a downpour, the wind has sown sturdy seeds, but tears dry too soon to let them sprout.

- Marcel Proust, Colors of Time: A Reverie, translated by Lee Geonsu, Minumsa, 13,000 KRW