Proust Way

We'll say there are two kinds of novelists: the snail and the swallow. The
swallow is quick, agile, and able to speed across long, tireless stretches.
Nothing a swallow does goes wrong; mistaken turns are instantly corrected, bad
weather is put to good use, and poor judgment can be tweaked just enough to look
like a flash of genius. In the implacable assembly line of prose, nothing is
ever wasted or thrown away. By contrast, the snail is slow, deliberate, fussy,
cramped. Swallows travel and seek out the world; the snail burrows into itself.
The swallow acts; the snail retracts, guesses, speculates. A swallow chugs life
down the way whales take in water, plankton and all, while the snail ingests
choice bits down a multichambered spiral, where its appetite, like its vision,
is eternally whorled. Balzac, Dickens, and Fielding are swallows, even
Tolstoy. (Marcel Proust, "Swann's Way")

I'm not too sure I get Proust's drift but I like his typology, simplistic maybe, but clearly makes the distinctive comparison. Some writers choose the trendier nihilistic outlook of the world and at a certain age, these are the writers we gravitate to, mirroring our own mugging despair and disenchantment. At the end of the day, we feel more dazed and confused, emptyhanded in our little excursions.