William Carter in his Marcel Proust, A Life (pp. 797) quoting from a Proust personal letter, written to his publisher a year before his death:
“‘Others… enjoy the entire universe. I can no longer move, speak, think, or simply enjoy the well-being of not suffering. Thus, expulsed from myself, so to speak, I seek refuge in my books, which I touch, being unable to read them, and I have for them the wariness of the burrowing wasp.’ Like the wasp, and ‘deprived of everything, my only care is to give my [books], through their absorption by other minds, the expansion that is refused me.”
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 