There are a few new entries in the Critical Dictionary today (see Links). I was going to include, under 'Novelty', the following passage by Proust, but am quoting it here instead:
"All novelty depends upon the prior elimination of the stereotypical attitude to which we have all grown accustomed, and which seemed to us to be reality itself. Any new form of conversation, like all original painting and music, must always appear exhausting. It is based on figures of speech with which we are not familiar, the speaker appears to us to be talking entirely in metaphors; and this wearies us, and gives us the impression of a want of truth. (After all, the old forms of speech must also in their time have been images difficult to follow, when the listener was not yet cognisant of the universe which they depicted. But for a long time it has been taken to be the real universe, and is instinctively relied upon. So when Bergotte - and his figures seem simple enough today - said of Cottard that he was a mannikin in a bottle, always trying to rise to the surface, people immediately felt the strain, and sought a foothold upon something which they called more concrete, meaning by that more usual."