Marcel Proust was the literary genius who gave us “In Search of Lost Time,” a sprawling novel in seven volumes that dives headlong into topics such as memory, the loss of time, and the fleeting nature of meaning itself. Proust was regarded as one of the most influential authors of the 20th century, and his private life was often the topic of public debate. But Proust largely let his magnum opus do the talking for him, safe in the knowledge that everything, be it folly or not, was at the whim of time and memory. He wrote: “The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.”