ATDTDA (2): Headwear in ATD? (pp. 1 - 44)

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

The Muse who has gathered up everything that the more exalted 
Muses of philosophy and art have rejected, everything that is not 
founded upon truth, everything that is merely contingent, but that 
reveals other laws as well, is History.

Everything that seems to us imperishable tends to destruction; a 
position in society, like anything else, is not created once and for 
all time, but, just as much as the power of an Empire, reconstructs 
itself at every moment by a sort of perpetual process of creation, 
which explains the apparent anomalies in social or political history 
in the course of half a century. The creation of the world did not 
occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day. 

Marcel Proust
The Sweet Cheat Gone

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/p/proust/marcel/p96sw/chapter4.html

The Way We Were/Are
by Jack Mauro
EDGE Columnist
Monday Aug 21, 2006

There is no need here to spell out why I now believe I know more 
about the aristocracy of late 19th Century France than any 
middle-aged man from New Jersey should know. Nor will I tell 
you why Marcel Proust was and is so heralded a literary force. I 
will say that, if God does indeed reside in the details, Proust 
worshipped like a man on fire. I’ll confess as well that, a virtual 
library of profound insights aside, I find myself haunted by his 
minor observation that ladies’ hats are like yachts, and should 
never exceed a certain size. If women ever go back to wearing 
hats and society returns, I will be a killer at chic dinner parties.

http://www.edgeboston.com/index.php?ch=columns&sc=jackmauro&id=1907

Maybe if Pynchon hats are good they get reincarnated in Proust? Yashmeen, in
Venice, is caught by the bora wind:

"...she was more immediately concerned with the loss of her hat, flying away
to join hundreds of others in migration to some more southerly climate, some
tropical resort of hats where they could find weeks of hat dolce far niente
to grow new feathers, allow their color to return or find new shades, lie
and dream about heads that Fate had meant them to adorn..." (816)