“When writing a book once about the Dalai Lama, I was startled to realize that the very core of one of his lessons was expressed for me by none other than the pampered-sounding Frenchman, who notes, at the very beginning of his final volume, as if to put things in perspective, “For in this world of ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than beauty: namely, grief.”
Pico Iyer explains how Proust was an accidental Buddhist over at the New York Review of Books.
