How Proust Can Change Your Life

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

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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.

THE 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