How Proust Can Change Your Life

Why would they previously have lacked such a relationship? Why wouldn’t they have appreciated their tableware and fruit? At one level, such questions seem superfluous. It just appears natural

to be struck by the beauty of some things and to be left cold by others. There is no conscious rumination or decision behind our choice of what appeals to us visually; we simply know we are moved by palaces but not by kitchens, by porcelain but not by china, by guavas but not apples.

However, the immediacy with which aesthetic judgments arise should not fool us into assuming that their origins are entirely natural or their verdicts unalterable. Proust’s letter to Monsieur Mainguet hinted as much. By saying that great painters were the ones by whom our eyes were opened, Proust was at the same time implying that our sense of beauty was not immobile, and could be sensitized by painters, who would, through their canvases, inculcate in us an appreciation of once neglected aesthetic qualities. If the dissatisfied young man had failed to consider the family tableware or fruit, it was in part out of a lack of acquaintance with images that would have shown him the key to their attractions.

Great painters possess such power to open our eyes because of the unusual receptivity of their own eyes to aspects of visual experience: to the play of light on the end of a spoon, the fibrous softness of a tablecloth, the velvety skin of a peach, or the pinkish tones of an old man’s skin—qualities that can in turn inspire our impressions of beauty. We might caricature the history of art as a succession of geniuses engaged in pointing out different elements worthy of our attention, a succession of painters using their immense technical mastery to say what amounts to “Aren’t those back streets in Delft pretty?” or “Isn’t the Seine nice outside Paris?” And in Chardin’s case, to say to the world, and some of the dissatisfied young men in it, “Look not just at the Roman campagna

, the pageantry of Venice, and the proud expression of Charles I astride his horse, but also have a look at the bowl on the sideboard, the dead fish in your kitchen, and the crusty bread loaves in the hall.”

The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust’s therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them. Appreciating the beauty of crusty loaves does not preclude our interest in a château, but failing to do so must call into question our overall capacity for appreciation. The gap between what the dissatisfied youth could see in his flat and what Chardin noticed in very similar interiors places the emphasis on a certain way of looking, as opposed to a mere process of acquiring or possessing.

The young man in the Chardin essay of 1895 was not the last Proustian character to be unhappy because he couldn’t open his eyes. He shared important similarities with another dissatisfied Proustian hero, who appeared some eighteen years later. The Chardin youth and the narrator of In Search of Lost Time were both suffering from depression and were both living in a world drained of interest when they were both rescued by a vision of their world which presented it in its true, yet unexpectedly glorious, colors, and which reminded them of their failure to open their eyes adequately until then—the only difference being that one of these glorious visions came from a gallery in the Louvre, and the other from a boulangerie.

To outline the baking case, Proust describes his narrator sitting at home one winter’s afternoon, suffering from a cold and feeling rather dispirited by the dreary day he has had, with only the prospect of another dreary day ahead of him tomorrow. His mother comes into the room and asks if he’d like a cup of lime-blossom tea. He declines her offer, but then, for no particular reason, changes his mind. To accompany this tea, his mother brings him a madeleine, a squat, plump little cake that looks as if it had been molded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. The dispirited, rheumatic narrator breaks off a morsel, drops it into the tea, and takes a sip, at which point something miraculous happens: