How Proust Can Change Your Life

One day when we were coming out of a concert where we had heard Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, I was humming some vague notes which I thought expressed the emotion I had just experienced, and I exclaimed, with an emphasis which I only later understood to be ridiculous: “That’s a

wonderful bit!” Proust started to laugh and said, “But, my dear Lucien, it’s not your

poum, poum, poum

that’s going to convey this wonderfulness! It would be better to try and explain it!” At the time, I wasn’t very happy, but I had just received an unforgettable lesson

.

It was a lesson in trying to find the right words for things. The process can be counted upon to go badly awry. We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so. We hear Beethoven’s Ninth and hum poum, poum,

poum; we see the pyramids at Giza and go, “That’s nice.” These sounds are asked to account for an experience, but their poverty prevents either ourselves or our interlocutors from really understanding what we have lived through. We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.

Proust had a friend called Gabriel de La Rochefoucauld. He was an aristocratic young man, whose ancestor had written a famous short book in the seventeenth century, and who liked to spend time in glamorous Paris nightspots, so much time that he had been labeled by some of his more sarcastic contemporaries “le La Rochefoucauld de chez Maxim’s.” But in 1904 Gabriel forsook the nightlife in order to try his hand at literature. The result was a novel, The Lover and the Doctor, which Gabriel sent to Proust in manuscript form as soon as it was finished, with a request for comments and advice.

“Bear in mind that you have written a fine and powerful novel, a superb, tragic work of complex and consummate craftsmanship,” Proust reported back to his friend, who might have formed a slightly different impression after reading the lengthy letter which had preceded this eulogy. It seems that the superb and tragic work had a few problems, not least because it was filled with clichés: “There are some fine big landscapes in your novel,” explained Proust, treading delicately, “but at times one would like them to be painted with more originality. It’s quite true that the sky is on fire at sunset, but it’s been said too often, and the moon that shines discreetly is a trifle dull.”

We may ask why Proust objected to phrases that had been used too often. After all, doesn’t the moon shine discreetly? Don’t sunsets look as if they were on fire? Aren’t clichés just good ideas that have proved rightly popular?

The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun is often on fire at sunset and the moon discreet, but if we keep saying this every time we encounter a sun or a moon, we will end up believing that this is the last rather than the first word to be said on the subject. Clichés are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface. And if this matters, it is because the way we speak is ultimately linked to the way we feel, because how we describe the world must at some level reflect how we first experience it.

The moon Gabriel mentioned might of course have been discreet, but it is liable to have been a lot more besides. When the first volume of Proust’s novel was published eight years after The Lover and the Doctor, perhaps Gabriel (if he wasn’t back ordering Dom Perignon at Maxim’s) took time to notice that Proust had also included a moon, but that he had skirted two thousand years of ready-made moon talk and uncovered an unusual metaphor better to capture the reality of the lunar experience: