How Proust Can Change Your Life

by Alain De Botton

  How Proust Can Change Your Life

  Alain De Botton

  Acclaim for

  Alain de Botton

  ’s

  How Proust Can Change Your Life

  “Erudite.… After reading de Botton’s book, one will savor Proust with fresh wonder and gratitude.”

  —Washington Post

  “A lively, original guide to living, and … an engaging introduction to the life and letters of one of the century’s most interesting fictional thinkers … literary criticism wearing its slyest disguise since Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Ingenious … charming, erudite … an amusing homage to a literary genius whose utter lack of talent for living becomes a tender inspiration.”

  —Elle

  “Writing with great clarity, concision, and wit, de Botton translates the Proustian message into humbler but energetic prose.”

  —Village Voice Literary Supplement

  “Proust, through de Botton, offers wiser and wittier advice, and on more subjects, than any syndicated columnist.”

  —Hartford Courant

  “One of my favorite books of the year.… Seriously cheeky, cheekily serious.”

  —Julian Barnes

  “A witty, elegant book that helps us learn what reading is for.”

  —Doris Lessing

  “A wonderful meditation on aspects of Proust in the form of a self-help book.… Very enjoyable.”

  —Sebastian Faulks

  Also by

  Alain de Botton

  On Love

  The Romantic Movement

  Kiss and Tell

  The Consolations of Philosophy

  The Art of Travel

  Alain de Botton

  How Proust Can Change Your Life

  Alain de Botton is the author of On Love, The Romantic Movement, Kiss and Tell, The Consolations of Philosophy, and The Art of Travel. His work has been translated into twenty languages. He lives in Washington, D.C., and London. He can be reached at www.alaindebotton.com.

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MAY 1998

  Copyright © 1997 by Alain de Botton

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1997.

  Photograph Acknowledgments

  Barnaby’s Picture Library, Bridgeman Art Library, (Louvre, Paris), (Peter Willi, Musée Marmottan, Paris), (Louvre, Paris/Giraudon), (Louvre, Paris/Giraudon); Mary Evans Picture Library, Hulton Getty Collection, Simon Marsden

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:

  De Botton, Alain.

  How Proust can change your life / Alain de Botton.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83349-5

  1. Proust, Marcel, 1871–1922—Humor. I. Title.

  PQ2631.R63Z54917 1997

  843′.912—dc21 96-47106

  Author photograph © Miriam Berkley

  Random House Web address: www.randomhouse.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1. H OW TO LOVE LIFE TODAY

  2. H OW TO READ FOR YOURSELF

  3. H OW TO TAKE YOUR TIME

  4. H OW TO SUFFER SUCCESSFULLY

  5. H OW TO EXPRESS YOUR EMOTIONS

  6. H OW TO BE A GOOD FRIEND

  7. H OW TO OPEN YOUR EYES

  8. H OW TO BE HAPPY IN LOVE

  9. H OW TO PUT BOOKS DOWN

  A

  CKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness. Had we been placed on earth by a malign creator for the exclusive purpose of suffering, we would have good reason to congratulate ourselves on our enthusiastic response to the task. Reasons to be inconsolable abound: the frailty of our bodies, the fickleness of love, the insincerities of social life, the compromises of friendship, the deadening effects of habit. In the face of such persistent ills, we might naturally expect that no event would be awaited with greater anticipation than the moment of our own extinction.

  Someone looking for a paper to read in Paris in the 1920s might have picked up a title called L’Intransigeant. It had a reputation for investigative news, metropolitan gossip, comprehensive classifieds, and incisive editorials. It also had a habit of dreaming up big questions and asking French celebrities to send in their replies. “What do you think would be the ideal education to give your daughter?” was one. “Do you have any recommendations for improving traffic congestion in Paris?” was another. In the summer of 1922, the paper formulated a particularly elaborate question for its contributors:

  An American scientist announces that the world will end, or at least that such a huge part of the continent will be destroyed, and in such a sudden way, that death will be the certain fate of hundreds of millions of people. If this prediction were confirmed, what do you think would be its effects on people between the time when they acquired the aforementioned certainty and the moment of cataclysm? Finally, as far as you’re concerned, what would you do in this last hour?

  The first celebrity to respond to the grim scenario of personal and global annihilation was a then distinguished, now forgotten man of letters named Henri Bordeaux, who suggested that it would drive the mass of the population directly into either the nearest church or the nearest bedroom, though he himself avoided the awkward choice, explaining that he would take this last opportunity to climb a mountain, so as to admire the beauty of alpine scenery and flora. Another Parisian celebrity, an accomplished actress called Berthe Bovy, proposed no recreations of her own, but shared with her readers a coy concern that men would shed all inhibitions once their actions had ceased to carry long-term consequences. This dark prognosis matched that of a famous Parisian palm reader, Madame Fraya, who judged that people would omit to spend their last hours contemplating the extraterrestrial future and would be too taken up with worldly pleasures to give much thought to readying their souls for the afterlife—a suspicion confirmed when another writer, Henri Robert, blithely declared his intention to devote himself to a final game of bridge, tennis, and golf.

  The last celebrity to be consulted on his pre-apocalypse plans was a reclusive, mustachioed novelist not known for his interest in golf, tennis, or bridge (though he had once tried checkers, and twice aided in the launching of a kite), a man who had spent the last fourteen years lying in a narrow bed under a pile of thinly woven woolen blankets writing an unusually long novel without an adequate bedside lamp. Since the publication of its first volume in 1913, In Search of Lost Time had been hailed as a masterpiece, a French reviewer had compared the author to Shakespeare, an Italian critic had likened him to Stendhal, and an Austrian princess had offered her hand in marriage. Though he had never esteemed himself highly (“If only I could value myself more! Alas! It is impossible”) and had once referred to himself as a flea and to his writing as a piece of indigestible nougat, Marcel Proust had grounds for satisfaction. Even the British Ambassador to France, a man of wide acquaintance and cautious judgment, had deemed it appropriate to bestow on him a great if not directly literary honor, describing him as “the most remarkable man I have ever met—because he keeps his overcoat on at dinner.”

  Enthusiastic about contributing to newspapers, and in any case a good sport, Proust sent the following
reply to L’Intransigeant and its catastrophic American scientist:

  I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it—our life—hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly

  .

  But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! if only the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time, we won’t miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India

  .

  The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening

  .

  Feeling suddenly attached to life when we realize the imminence of death suggests that it was perhaps not life itself which we had lost the taste for so long as there was no end in sight, but our quotidian version of it, that our dissatisfactions were more the result of a certain way of living than of anything irrevocably morose about human experience. Having surrendered the customary belief in our own immortality, we would then be reminded of a host of untried possibilities lurking beneath the surface of an apparently undesirable, apparently eternal existence.

  However, if due acknowledgment of our mortality encourages us to reevaluate our priorities, we may well ask what these priorities should be. We might only have been living a half-life before we faced up to the implications of death, but what exactly does a whole life consist of? Simple recognition of our inevitable demise does not guarantee that we will latch on to any sensible answers when it comes to filling in what remains of the diary. Panicked by the ticking of the clock, we may even resort to some spectacular follies. The suggestions sent by the Parisian celebrities to L’Intransigeant were contradictory enough: admiration of alpine scenery, contemplation of the extraterrestrial future, tennis, golf. But were any of these fruitful ways to pass the time before the continent disintegrated?

  Proust’s own suggestions (Louvre, love, India) were no more helpful. For a start, they were at odds with what one knows of his character. He had never been an avid museum visitor, he hadn’t been to the Louvre in over a decade, and preferred to look at reproductions rather than face the chatter of a museum crowd (“People think the love of literature, painting and music has become extremely widespread, whereas there isn’t a single person who knows anything about them”). Nor was he known for his interest in the Indian sub continent, which was a trial to reach, requiring a train down to Marseilles, a mail boat to Port Said, and ten days on a P&O liner across the Arabian Sea, hardly an ideal itinerary for a man with difficulty stepping out of bed. As for Miss X, to his mother’s distress, Marcel had never proved receptive to her charms, nor to those of the Misses A to Z; and it was a long time since he had bothered to ask if there was a younger brother at hand, having concluded that a glass of well-chilled beer offered a more reliable source of pleasure than lovemaking.

  But even if he had wanted to act according to his proposals, Proust turned out to have little chance. Only four months after sending his answer to L’Intransigeant, having predicted that something like this would happen for years, he caught a cold and died. He was fifty-one. He had been invited to a party and, despite the symptoms of a mild flu, he wrapped himself in three coats and two blankets and went out all the same. On his way home, he had to wait in a glacial courtyard for a taxi, and there caught a chill. It developed into a high fever that might have been contained if Proust hadn’t refused to take the advice of doctors summoned to his bedside. Fearing that they would disrupt his work, he turned down their offer of camphorated oil injections, and continued to write, failing to eat or drink anything besides hot milk, coffee, and stewed fruit. The cold turned into bronchitis, which snowballed into pneumonia. Hopes of recovery were briefly raised when he sat up in bed and requested a grilled sole, but by the time the fish was bought and cooked, he was seized by nausea and was unable to touch it. He died a few hours later from a burst abscess in his lung.

  Fortunately, Proust’s reflections on how to live were not limited to an all-too-brief and somewhat confusing reply to a fanciful question from a newspaper—because, right up to his death, he had been at work on a book that set out to answer, albeit in a rather extended and narratively complex form, a question not dissimilar to the one provoked by the predictions of the fictional American scientist.

  The title of the long book hinted as much. Though Proust never liked it, and referred to it variously as “unfortunate” (1914), “misleading” (1915), and “ugly” (1917), In Search of Lost Time had the advantage of pointing directly enough to a central theme of the novel: a search for the causes behind the dissipation and loss of time. Far from a memoir tracing the passage of a more lyrical age, it was a practical, universally applicable story about how to stop wasting time and start to appreciate life.

  Though the announcement of an imminent apocalypse could no doubt make this a concern uppermost in anyone’s mind, the Proustian guidebook held out a hope that the topic could detain us a little before personal or global destruction was at hand; and that we might therefore learn to adjust our priorities before it was time to have a last game of golf and keel over.

  Proust was born into a family where the art of making people feel better was taken very seriously indeed. His father was a doctor, a vast, bearded man with a characteristic nineteenth-century physiognomy, who had the authoritative air and purposeful glance that might readily have made one feel a sissy. He exuded the moral superiority available to the medical profession, a group whose value to society is unquestionably apparent to anyone who has ever suffered from a tickly cough or ruptured appendix, and which may hence provoke an uncomfortable sense of superfluity in those with less certifiably worthwhile vocations.

  Dr. Adrien Proust had started modestly, the son of a provincial grocer specializing in the manufacture of wax candles for the home and church. After pursuing brilliant medical studies, culminating in a thesis on The Different Forms of Softening of the Brain, Dr. Proust had devoted himself to improving standards of public sanitation. He was especially concerned with arresting the spread of cholera and bubonic plague, and had traveled widely outside France, advising foreign governments on infectious diseases. He was appropriately rewarded for his efforts, becoming a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur and a professor of hygiene at the Medical Faculty in Paris. The mayor of the once cholera-prone port of Toulon presented him with the keys to the city, and a hospital for quarantined victims was named after him in Marseilles. By the time of his death in 1903, Adrien Proust was a doctor of international standing, who could almost be believed when he summed up his existence with the thought, “I have been happy all my life.”

  No wonder Marcel should have felt somewhat unworthy next to his father, and feared that he had been the bane of this contented life. He had never harbored any of the professional aspirations that constituted a badge of normality in a late-nineteenth-century bourgeois household. Literature was the only thing he cared for, though he did not, for much of his youth, seem too willing, or able, to write. Because he was a good son, he tried at first to do something his parents would approve of. There were thoughts of joining the Foreign Ministry, of becoming a lawyer, a stockbroker, or an assistant at the Louvre. Yet the hunt for a career proved difficult. Two weeks of work experience with a solicitor horrified him (“In my most desperate moments, I have never conceived of anything more horrible than a law office”), and the idea of becoming a diplomat was ruled out when he realized it would involve moving away from Paris and his beloved mother. “What is there left, given that I have decided to become neither a lawyer, nor a doctor, nor a priest …?” asked an increasingly desperate twenty-two-year-old Proust.

  Perhaps he could beco
me a librarian. He applied and was chosen for an unpaid post at the Mazarine library. It might have been the answer, but Proust found the place too dusty for his lungs and asked for an ever-longer series of sick leaves, some of which he spent in bed, others on holiday, but few at a writing desk. He led an apparently charmed life, organizing dinner parties, going out for tea, and spending money like water. One can imagine the distress of his father, a practical man who had never displayed much interest in the arts (though he had once served in the medical corps of the Opéra Comique and had charmed an American opera singer, who sent him a picture of herself dressed as a man in frilly, knee-length pantaloons). After he repeatedly failed to report for work, showing up one day a year or less, even Marcel’s unusually tolerant library employers finally lost their patience and dismissed him five years after he had first been taken on. It had by this time become evident to all, not least his disappointed father, that Marcel would never have a proper job—and would remain forever reliant on family money to pursue his unremunerative and dilettantish interest in literature.

  Which could make it hard to understand an ambition Proust confided to his maid once both his parents had died and he had finally started work on his novel.

  “Ah, Céleste,” he said, “if I could be sure of doing with my books as much as my father did for the sick.”

  To do with books what Adrien had done for those ravaged by cholera and bubonic plague? One didn’t have to be the mayor of Toulon to realize that Dr. Proust had it in his power to effect an improvement in people’s condition, but what sort of healing did Marcel have in mind with the seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time? The opus might be a way to pass a slow-moving train journey across the Siberian steppes, but would one wish to claim that its benefits matched those of a properly functioning public sanitation system?