Topical Guide 288
Mark Dorset
Foreshadowing
Too quickly for fear to stop him, Herb leaned forward and kissed her cheek. It was hardly a kiss at all. His lips just brushed her cheek. As the years passed, Lorna would become less and less sure about her memory of what Herb had said to her when he returned, but she never forgot that wisp of a kiss. It was the unforgettable statement Herb had hoped to make.
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 7
Remember that gesture, that wisp of a kiss.
Words and Gestures: Their Effect on Others, Fleeting or Lasting
It is difficult for any of us to calculate exactly on what scale his words or his gestures are apparent to others. Partly from the fear of exaggerating our own importance, and also because we enlarge to enormous proportions the field over which the impressions formed by other people in the course of their lives are obliged to extend, we imagine that the accessories of our speech and attitudes scarcely penetrate the consciousness, still less remain in the memory of those with whom we converse. … But it is quite possible that, even in what concerns the millennial existence of the human race, the philosophy of the journalist, according to which everything is destined to oblivion, is less true than a contrary philosophy which would predict the conservation of everything. In the same newspaper in which the moralist of the “Paris column” says to us of an event, of a work of art, all the more forcibly of a singer who has enjoyed her “crowded hour”: “Who will remember this in ten years’ time?” overleaf does not the report of the Academie des Inscriptions speak often of a fact, in itself of smaller importance, of a poem of little merit, which dates from the epoch of the Pharaohs and is now known again in its entirety? Is it not, perhaps, just the same in our brief life on earth?
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove
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