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How Proust Can Change Your Life |
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The Self-Help Classics |
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How Proust Can Change Your Life |
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The father of the family was an esteemed professor of hygiene who wrote countless scholarly papers and travelled widely. The son also became a doctor, financially successful and fond of sports, whose robustness was such that he had once been run over by a cart and horses and lived. Then there was the other son, a sickly aesthete who lived off his parents' money and could not even keep a simple library job. In his healthier times, he was to be seen at the Paris opera or giving dinner parties. Only after both his parents had died was he ready to make something of his life, and he was in his mid-thirties by the time he settled down to write; it would then be years before he would receive any recognition. As Alain de Botton relates it, Proust expressed to his maid what must have seemed a forlorn hope: ‘Ah, Celeste, if I could be sure of doing as much with my books as much as my father did for the sick.’ Proust was interested in putting suffering to good use; for him this was ‘the whole art of living’. Noting that philosophers have traditionally been in pursuit of theories of happiness, in Proust de Botton finds a substantially more useful form of life advice: that instead of seeking to make our lives a sort of Disneyland of fulfilled aspirations, it is better to find ways in which we can be ‘productively unhappy’. Suffering always seems to surprise us, when maybe it shouldn’t. Many of the characters in Proust’s writing are bad sufferers, employing defence mechanisms against facing up to their ‘issues’ – making them insufferable people. The good sufferer sees the bitter logic in what he or she is feeling, knowing that matters inevitably lose their emotional intensity, leaving residues of wisdom. For many, the word ‘Proust’ conjures up images of untouchable intellectuality and refinement, writing that can take us back to a Parisian golden age when life was somehow grander and richer. De Botton tells us how wrong this view is. The irony of De Botton’s homage to Proust is that it contains a warning not to love Proust too much. We should not bother to visit the town of Combray where the writer spent some of his childhood summers, trying to see what he saw; rather, the object of reading him is to come away with a heightened sense of perception that can be employed wherever you are and in whatever time you live. To wish we had lived in Proust’s time, with its madelaine cakes, horse carriages and banquets, is a crime committed against the possibilities of the present. Is the seven volume, million-and-a-quarter word In Search of Lost Time, considered by many the greatest book of the 20th century, really a self-help book? This suggestion has enraged some Proust devotees, because Art is not to be cheapened by any suggestion of practical therapeutic value. Though it has an elitist and cultured image, Proust once said that the readers he sought were ‘...the sort of people who buy a badly printed volume before catching a train’. As De Botton has it, Proust did not write so that he could receive recognition as a literary maestro, but for his own redemption. If it had helped him, maybe it would help others. Thanks to de Botton, a
Proustian understanding of life, in all its complexity
and subtlety, is now an option for readers who may never
have bothered to look beyond the clear-cut, rosy answers
of a Stephen Covey or a Tony Robbins. De Botton will have
succeeded if the people who might normally read books
about ‘time management’ can be moved to
consider the nature of time itself.
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