According to the experts Proust had 6-7 experiences with melon seeds during his lifetime. The first was when a wind breaked a Proust, oh no the opposite, when Proust breaked a wind, with a melon seed in it. Although this melon seed had traveled through both the digestive and nervous systems it shooted right through Proust’s long white underpants and into the ground, where it later turned into a melon plant. The second to the sixth experience was when Proust five times, just as he was going to put a spoonful of ice into his mouth, got a melon seed, dropped by a bird, onto the ice-lump, which then wrapped itself so thoroughly into the lump that Proust wrote four pages about it in a letter to a certain Markus West. It is left to the reader to assess whether the melon seeds of Proust’s life became landmark, as the page numbers throughout the book have been replaced by cheerful images of nickels.
