How Proust Can Change Your Life

by Alain De Botton

  Q: Does this mean he didn’t think much of making love?

  A: He merely thought humans were missing an anatomical part with which to perform the act properly. In the Proustian scheme, it is impossible to love someone physically. Given the coyness of his age, he limited his thoughts to the disappointment of kissing:

  Man, a creature clearly less rudimentary than the sea-urchin or even the whale, nevertheless lacks a certain number of essential organs, and particularly possesses none that will serve for kissing. For this absent organ he substitutes his lips, and perhaps he thereby achieves a result slightly more satisfying than caressing his beloved with a horny tusk. But a pair of lips, designed to convey to the palate the taste of whatever whets their appetite, must be content, without understanding their mistake or admitting their disappointment, with roaming over the surface and with coming to a halt at the barrier of the impenetrable but irresistible cheek

  .

  Why do we kiss people? At one level, merely to generate the pleasurable sensation of rubbing an area of nerve endings against a corresponding strip of soft, fleshy, moist skin tissue. However, the hopes with which we approach the prospect of an initial kiss typically extend beyond this. We seek to hold and savor not just a mouth but an entire beloved person. With the kiss, we hope to achieve a higher form of possession; the longing a beloved inspires in us promises to come to an end once our lips are allowed to roam freely over theirs.

  But for Proust, though a kiss can produce a pleasurable physical tingle, it cannot grant us a true sense of amorous possession.

  For example, his narrator is attracted to Albertine, whom he met as she walked along the Normandy Coast one brilliant summer’s day. He is attracted to her rosy cheeks, her black hair, her beauty spot, her impudent, confident manner, and to things she evokes and makes him nostalgic for—the summer, the smell of the sea, youth. Once he returns to Paris after the summer, Albertine comes to his flat. In contrast to her reserve when he tried to kiss her at the seaside, she now lies close to him on the bed and falls into an embrace. It promises to be a moment of resolution. Yet, whereas he had hoped the kiss would allow him to savor Albertine, her past, the beach, the summer, and the circumstances of their meeting, the reality is somewhat more prosaic. His lips brushing against Albertine’s allow him as much contact with her as a brush with a horny tusk. He can’t see her, because of the awkwardness of the kissing position, and his nose is so squashed he can hardly breathe.

  It may have been a particularly inept kiss, but by detailing its disappointments, Proust points to a general difficulty in a physical method of appreciation. The narrator recognizes that he could do almost anything physically with Albertine—take her on his knees, hold her head in his hands, caress her—but that he would still be doing nothing other than touching the sealed envelope of a far more elusive beloved person.

  This might not matter were it not for a tendency to believe that physical contact might in fact put us directly in touch with the object of our love. Disappointed with the kiss, we then risk ascribing our disappointment to the tedium of the person we were kissing, rather than to the limitations involved in doing so.

  Q: Are there any secrets to long-lasting relationships?

  A: Infidelity. Not the act itself, but the threat of it. For Proust, an injection of jealousy is the only thing capable of rescuing a relationship ruined by habit. A word of advice for someone who has taken the fatal step of cohabitation:

  When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love her; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy

  .

  Nevertheless, the characters in Proust’s novel are inept at capitalizing on their jealousy. The threat of losing their partner may lead them to realize that they have not appreciated this person adequately, but because they only understand physical appreciation, they do no more than secure physical allegiance, which merely brings temporary relief before boredom sets in again. It means they are forced into a debilitating vicious circle: they desire someone, kiss them with a horny tusk, and get bored. If someone threatens the relationship, they get jealous, wake up for a moment, have another kiss with the horny tusk, and get bored once more. Condensed into a male heterosexual version, the situation runs like this:

  Afraid of losing her, we forget all the others. Sure of keeping her, we compare her with those others whom at once we prefer to her

  .

  Q: So what would Proust have told these unhappy lovers if he had been able to meet and help them, as he had boasted to André Gide?

  A: At a guess, he would have sent them to think about Noah and the world he could suddenly see from his Ark, and about the Duchesse de Guermantes and the dresses she had never looked at properly in her closet.

  Q: But what would he have said to Swann and Odette in particular?

  A: A fine question—but there are limits to how far one can ignore the lesson of perhaps the wisest person in Proust’s book, a certain Madame Leroi, who, when asked for her views on love, curtly replies:

  “Love? I make it often, but I never talk about it.”

  How seriously should we take books? “Dear friend,” Proust told André Gide, “I believe, contrary to the fashion among our contemporaries, that one can have a very lofty idea of literature, and at the same time have a good-natured laugh at it.” The remark may have been throwaway, but its underlying message was not. For a man who devoted his life to literature, Proust manifested a singular awareness of the dangers of taking books too seriously, or rather of adopting a fetishistically reverent attitude toward them which, while appearing to pay due homage, would in fact travesty the spirit of literary production; a healthy relationship to other people’s books would depend as much on an appreciation of their limitations as of their benefits.

  T HE BENEFITS OF READING

  In 1899, things were going badly for Proust. He was twenty-eight, he had done nothing with his life, he was still living at home, he had never earned any money, he was always ill, and, worst of all, he had been trying to write a novel for the last four years and it was showing few signs of working out. In the autumn of that year, he went on holiday to the French Alps, to the spa town of Évian, and it was here that he read and fell in love with the works of John Ruskin, the English art critic renowned for his writings on Venice, Turner, the Italian Renaissance, Gothic architecture, and alpine landscapes.

  Proust’s encounter with Ruskin exemplified the benefits of reading. “The universe suddenly regained infinite value in my eyes,” explained Proust subsequently, because the universe had had such value in Ruskin’s eyes, and because he had been a genius at transmuting his impressions into words. Ruskin had expressed things that Proust might have felt himself but could not have articulated on his own; in Ruskin, he found experiences that he had never been more than semiconscious of raised and beautifully assembled in language.

  Ruskin sensitized Proust to the visible world, to architecture, art, and nature. Here is Ruskin awakening his readers’ senses to a few of the many things going on in an ordinary mountain stream:

  If it meets a rock three or four feet above the level of its bed, it will often neither part nor foam, nor express any

  concern about the matter, but clear it in a smooth dome of water, without apparent exertion, the whole surface of the surge being drawn into parallel lines by its extreme velocity, so that the whole river has the appearance of a deep and raging sea, with only this difference, that torrent-waves always break backwards, and sea-waves forwards. Thus, then, in the water which has gained an impetus, we have the most exquisite arrangements of curved lines, perpetually changing from convex to concave, and vice versa, following every swell and hollow of the bed with their modulating grace, and all in unison of motion, presenting perhaps the most beautiful series of inorganic forms which nature can possibly produce

  .

  Aside from landscape, Ruskin helped Proust to discover the beauty of the great cathedral
s of northern France. When he returned to Paris after his holiday, Proust traveled to Bourges and to Chartres, to Amiens and Rouen. Later explaining what Ruskin had taught him, Proust pointed to a passage on Rouen Cathedral in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, in which Ruskin minutely described a particular stone figure that had been carved, together with hundreds of others, in one of the cathedral’s portals. The figure was of a little man, no more than ten centimeters high, with a vexed, puzzled expression, and one hand pressed hard against his cheek, wrinkling the flesh under his eye.

  For Proust, Ruskin’s concern for the little man had effected a kind of resurrection, one characteristic of great art. He had known how to look at this figure, and had hence brought it back to life for succeeding generations. Ever polite, Proust offered a playful apology to the little figure for what would have been his own inability to notice him without Ruskin as a guide (“I would not have been clever enough to find you, amongst the thousands of stones in our towns, to pick out your figure, to rediscover your personality, to summon you, to make you live again”). It was a symbol of what Ruskin had done for Proust, and what all books might do for their readers—namely, bring back to life, from the deadness caused by habit and inattention, valuable yet neglected aspects of experience.

  Because he had been so impressed by Ruskin, Proust sought to extend his contact with him by engaging in the traditional occupation open to those who love reading: literary scholarship. He set aside his novelistic projects and became a Ruskin scholar. When the English critic died in 1900, he wrote his obituary, followed it up with several essays, and then undertook the immense task of translating Ruskin into French, a task all the more ambitious because he hardly spoke any English and, according to Georges de Lauris, would have had trouble correctly ordering a lamb chop in English in a restaurant. However, he succeeded in producing highly accurate translations of both Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens and his Sesame and Lilies, adding an array of scholarly footnotes testifying to the breadth of his Ruskinian knowledge. It was work he carried out with the fanaticism and rigor of a maniacal professor; in the words of his friend Marie Nordlinger:

  The apparent discomfort in which he worked was quite incredible, the bed was littered with books and papers, his

  pillows all over the place, a bamboo table on his left piled high and more often than not, no support for whatever he was writing on (no wonder he wrote illegibly), with a cheap wooden penholder or two lying where it had fallen on the floor

  .

  Because Proust was such a good scholar and such an unsuccessful novelist, an academic career must have beckoned. It was his mother’s hope. After watching him waste years on a novel that had gone nowhere, she took pleasure in discovering that her son had the makings of a fine scholar. Proust could not have ignored his own aptitude, and indeed, many years later, expressed sympathy with his mother’s judgment:

  I always agreed with maman that I could have done only one thing in life, but a thing which we both valued so much that it is saying a lot: namely, an excellent professor

  .

  T HE LIMITATIONS OF READING

  However, needless to say, Proust did not become Professor Proust, Ruskin scholar and translator. A significant fact, given how well suited he was to academic discipline, how ill suited he was to almost everything else, and how much he respected his beloved mother’s judgment.

  His reservations could hardly have been more subtle. He was in no doubt as to the immense value of reading and study, and could defend his Ruskinian labors against any vulgar arguments in favor of mental self-sufficiency.

  The mediocre usually imagine that to let ourselves be guided by the books we admire robs our faculty of judgement of part of its independence. “What can it matter to you what Ruskin feels: feel for yourself.” Such a view rests on a psychological error which will be discounted by all those who have accepted a spiritual discipline and feel thereby that their power of understanding and of feeling is infinitely enhanced, and their critical sense never paralysed.… There is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt. In this profound effort it is our thought itself that we bring out into the light, together with his

  .

  Yet something in this forceful defense of reading and scholarship intimated Proust’s reservations. Without drawing attention to how contentious or critical the point was, he argued that we should be reading for a particular reason: not to pass the time, not out of detached curiosity, not out of a dispassionate wish to find out what Ruskin felt, but because, to repeat with italics, “there is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt.” We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thoughts that help us do so. A fulfilled academic life would therefore require us to judge that the writers we were studying articulated in their books a sufficient range of our own concerns, and that in the act of understanding them through translation or commentary, we would simultaneously be understanding and developing the spiritually significant parts of ourselves.

  And herein lay Proust’s problem, because in his view, books could not make us aware of enough of the things we felt. They might open our eyes, sensitize us, enhance our powers of perception, but at a certain point they would stop, not by coincidence, not occasionally, not out of bad luck, but inevitably, by definition, for the stark and simple reason that the author wasn’t us. There would come a moment with every book when we would feel that something was incongruous, misunderstood, or constraining, and it would give us a responsibility to leave our guide behind and continue our thoughts alone. Proust’s respect for Ruskin was enormous, but having worked intensely on his texts for six years, having lived with bits of paper scattered across his bed and his bamboo table piled high with books, in a particular burst of irritation at continually being tethered to another man’s words, Proust exclaimed that Ruskin’s qualities had not prevented him from frequently “being silly, maniacal, constraining, false and ridiculous.”

  The fact that Proust did not at this point turn to translating George Eliot or annotating Dostoyevsky signals a recognition that the frustration he felt with Ruskin was not incidental to this author, but reflected a universally constraining dimension to reading and scholarship, and was sufficient reason never to strive for the title of Professor Proust.

  It is one of the great and wonderful characteristics of good books (which allows us to see the role at once essential

  yet limited that reading may play in our spiritual lives) that for the author they may be called “Conclusions” but for the reader “Incitements.” We feel very strongly that our own wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off, and we would like him to provide us with answers when all he is able to do is provide us with desires.… That is the value of reading, and also its inadequacy. To make it into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it

  .

  However, Proust was singularly aware of how tempting it was to believe that reading could constitute our entire spiritual life, which led him to formulate some careful lines of instruction on a responsible approach to books:

  As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. It becomes dangerous on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place, when the truth no longer appears to us as an ideal which we can realise only by the intimate progress of our own thought and the efforts of our heart, but as something material, deposited between the leaves of books like a honey fully prepared by others and which we need only take the trouble to reach down from the shelves of libraries and then sam
ple passively in a perfect repose of mind and body

  .

  Because books are so good at helping us to become aware of certain things we feel, Proust recognized the ease with which we could be tempted to leave the entire task of interpreting our lives to these objects.

  He gave an example in his novel of the dangers of this excessive reliance, in a vignette about a man reading the works of La Bruyère. He pictured him coming across the following aphorism in the pages of Les Caractères:

  Men often want to love, without managing to do so: they seek their own ruin without being able to attain it, and, if I can put it thus, they are forced against their will to remain free

  .

  Because this suitor had tried unsuccessfully for years to make himself loved by a woman who would only have made him unhappy if she had loved him, Proust conjectured that the link between his own life and the aphorism would deeply move this unfortunate suitor. He would now read the passage over and over again, swelling it with meaning until it was ready to burst, appending to the aphorism a million words and the most stirring memories of his own life, repeating it with immense joy because it seemed so beautiful and so true.

  Though it was undoubtedly a crystallization of many aspects of this man’s experience, Proust implied that such extreme enthusiasm for La Bruyère’s thought would at some point distract the man from the particularities of his own feelings. The aphorism might have helped him to understand part of his story, but it did not reflect it exactly; in order to fully capture his romantic misfortunes, the sentence would have had to read, “Men often want to be loved …” rather than “Men want to love.…” It wasn’t a major difference, but it was a symbol of the way that books, even when they brilliantly articulate some of our experiences, may nevertheless leave others behind.