Proust, Reading and Friendship

"No doubt friendship, friendship for individuals, is a frivolous thing, and reading is a friendship. But at least it is a sincere friendship, and the fact that it is directed to one who is dead, who is absent, gives it something disinterested, almost moving. It is, moreover, a friendship unencumbered with all that makes up the ugliness of other kinds. Since we are all, we the living, only the dead who have not yet assumed our roles, all these compliments, all these greetings in the hall which we call deference, gratitude, devotion, and in which we mingle so many lies, are sterile and tiresome. [....] In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its first purity. With books, no amiability. These friends, if we spend an evening with them, it is truly because we desire them. In their case, at least, we often leave only with regret. And with none of those thoughts, when we have left, that spoil friendship. What did they think of us? Didn't we lack tact? Did we please? All these agitations of friendship come to an end at the threshold of that pure and calm friendship that reading is. No more deference; we laugh at what Moliere says only to the exact degree that we find him funy; when he bores us, we are not afraid to appear bored, and when we decidedly have had enough of being with him, we put him back in his palce as bluntly as if he had neither genius nor fame. The atmosphere of that pure friendship is silence, purer thatn speech. For we speak for others, but we keep silent for ourselves.