Proust —
“It sometimes happened too, however, that the habits which bound me were suddenly abolished, generally when some former self, full of the desire to live an exhilarating life, momentarily took the place of my present self. I felt this longing to escape especially strongly one day when … I had gone on horseback to call on the Verdurins and had taken an unfrequented path through the woods the beauty of which they had extolled to me. Hugging the contours of the cliff, it alternately climbed and then, hemmed in by dense woods on either side, dived into wild gorges. For a moment the barren rocks by which I was surrounded, and the sea that was visible through their jagged gaps, swam before my eyes like fragments of another universe. . . Suddenly, my horse reared: he had heard a strange sound; it was all I could do to hold him and remain in the saddle; then I raised my tear-filled eyes in the direction from which the sound seemed to come and saw, not two hundred feet above my head, against the sun, between two great wings of flashing metal which were bearing him aloft, a creature whose indistinct face appeared to me to resemble that of a man. . . I wept — for I had been ready to weep the moment I realized that the sound came from above my head . . . at the thought that what I was going to see for the first time was an aeroplane. … Meanwhile the airman seemed to be uncertain of his course; I felt that there lay open before him — before me, had not habit made me a prisoner — all the routes in space, in life itself; he flew on, let himself glide for a few moments over the sea, then quickly making up his mind, seeming to yield to some attraction that was the reverse of gravity, as though returning to his native element, with a slight adjustment of his golden wings he headed straight up into the sky.”

Who writes more beautifully than Proust?

What caught my attention in this passage was the comment about a former self, full of the desire to live an exhilarating life, momentarily taking the place of the present self. I wouldn’t say that I desire an exhilarating life—in fact, I prefer a slow and contemplative life at this point. But I do sometimes experience the sensation of being overtaken with thoughts of alternatives, the other job I might have, the other place I might live. Often, in the morning hours of work, with a warm cup of coffee in hand and a mild weariness with the tedium on the computer monitor before me, I conjure a true optimism imagining all the routes of life which I believe, perhaps falsely, are available for me, not just jobs and locations, but things I want to learn and places I want to discover. So for a few hours, say between 9:30 and 11 AM, it IS possible to be happy, if only fleetingly.

I’m missing pages 589-590 of Sodom and Gomorrah. Those pages are simply missing from my copy.