On first glance, Proust and Miller could not appear to be more different – as writers but also as human beings. The former was a delicate, bourgeois recluse from the wealthy outskirts of Paris; the latter a gregarious, hardboiled scavenger from blue-collar Brooklyn. Yet these two writers meet profoundly in the space of literature. They both explore and tread upon similar issues in their work, in the world of the everyday. Yet they move through very different styles as they aim toward the ordinary, as it is stretched and prodded to reveal intangible truths. One might say it is actually the tone and not the style that distinguishes these two writers most strongly. After all, Miller emulates Proust in many ways, including the manipulation of his longwinded, intricate style that manages to address time, mortality, memory, existence and other phenomenological concepts embedded within common subject matter. Generally speaking, Proust heavily impacted Miller's life and writing by drawing out from him what was already present. To return to Baxandall’s concept of intertextuality as a reversal of ‘the active/ passive relation’ between the historical author and the later author, Miller is attracted to Proust because of his own compulsion to write in a similarly peripheral vein.