Unexpected connections

Pleasantly surprising rhymes of tone and subject like this one are the primary reason for my habit of reading a couple of novels at once.

From Sodom and Gomorrah (1921), by Marcel Proust, translated by John Sturrock

A demon of perversity had driven her, despising a ready-made position, to flee the conjugal home, and to live in the most scandalous fashion. Then, the world she had despised as a twenty-year-old, when it was at her feet, failed her cruelly at thirty, when, for the last ten years, no one, bar a few faithful woman friends, any long acknowledged her, and she had undertaken painstakingly to reconquer, bit by bit, what she had possessed at her birth (a not uncommon return journey).

From Do Everything in the Dark (2003), by Gary Indiana

"I want to forget all this," Jesse says, "but what if one day I want to remember?" Frivolous options.