How Proust Can Change Your Life

by Alain De Botton

  .

  The scenario may have been exaggerated for Madame Sert, but the moral was clear: that qualities like education or an ability to express oneself well did not follow simple paths, and that one could not therefore evaluate people on the basis of conspicuous categories. Just as Chardin had illustrated to the sad young man that beauty did not always lie in obvious places, so too the valet who spoke lovely French served to remind Proust (or perhaps just Madame Sert) that refinement was not conveniently tethered to its image.

  Simple images are nevertheless attractive in their lack of ambiguity. Before he saw Chardin’s paintings, the sad young man could at least believe that all bourgeois interiors were inferior to palaces, and could therefore make a simple equation between palaces and happiness. Before meeting aristocrats, Proust could at least trust in the existence of an entire class of superior beings, and could equate meeting them with acquiring a fulfilled social life. How much more difficult to factor in sumptuous bourgeois kitchens, boring princes, and drivers with more class than dukes. Simple images provide certainties; for instance, they assure us that financial expenditure is a guarantor of enjoyment.

  One sees people who are doubtful whether the sight of the sea and the sound of its waves are really enjoyable, but who become convinced that they are—and also convinced of the rare quality of their wholly detached tastes—when they have agreed to pay a hundred francs a day for a room in a hotel which will enable them to enjoy this sight and sound

  .

  Similarly, there are people who are doubtful whether someone is intelligent, but who rapidly become convinced that they are once they see them fit the dominant image of an intelligent person and learn of their formal education, factual knowledge, and university degree.

  Such people would have had no difficulty determining that Proust’s maid was an idiot. She thought that Napoleon and Bonaparte were two different people, and refused to believe Proust for a week when he suggested otherwise. But Proust knew she was brilliant (“I’ve never managed to teach her to spell, and she has never had the patience to read even half a page of my book, but she is full of extraordinary gifts”). This isn’t to propose an equally, if more perversely, snobbish argument that education has no value, and that the importance of European history from Campo Formio to the battle of Waterloo is the result of a sinister academic conspiracy, but rather that an ability to identify emperors and spell aproximately is not in itself enough to establish the existence of something as hard to define as intelligence.

  Albertine has never taken an art history course. One summer afternoon in Proust’s novel, she is sitting on a hotel terrace in Balbec talking to Madame de Cambremer, her daughter-in-law, a barrister friend of theirs, and the narrator. Suddenly, out at sea, a group of gulls who have been floating on top of the water take off noisily.

  “I love them; I saw them in Amsterdam,” says Albertine. “They smell of the sea, they come and sniff the salt air even through the paving stones.”

  “Ah, so you’ve been to Holland. Do you know the Vermeers?” asks Madame de Cambremer. Albertine replies that unfortunately she doesn’t know them, at which point Proust quietly shares with us Albertine’s even more unfortunate belief that these Vermeers are a group of Dutch people, not canvases in the Rijksmuseum.

  Luckily, the lacuna in her knowledge of art history goes by undetected, though one can imagine Madame de Cambremer’s horror had she discovered it. Nervous about her own ability to respond correctly to art, the external signs of artistic awareness take on a disproportionate significance for an art snob like Madame de Cambremer. Much as for the social snob, unable to judge others independently, a title or reputation becomes the only guide to eminence, so too for the art snob, information is ferociously clung to as a marker of artistic appreciation—though Albertine would only need to make another, culturally aware trip to Amsterdam in order to discover what she had missed. She might even appreciate Vermeer far more than Madame de Cambremer, for in her naïveté, there would at least be a potential for sincerity absent from de Cambremer’s exaggerated respect for art, which ironically ends up treating canvases far more like a family of Dutch burghers whom one would be privileged to meet.

  The moral? That we shouldn’t deny the bread on the sideboard a place in our conception of beauty, that we should shoot the painter rather than the spring and blame memory rather than what is remembered, that we should restrain our expectations when introduced to a Comte de Salignac-Fénelon-de-Clermont-Tonnerre and avoid fixating on spelling mistakes and alternative histories of imperial France when meeting those less elaborately titled.

  Q: Would Proust really be someone to consult for advice on romantic problems?

  A: Perhaps—in spite of the evidence. He outlined his credentials in a letter to André Gide:

  Incapable though I am of obtaining anything for myself, of sparing myself the least ill, I have been endowed (and it’s certainly my only gift) with the power to procure, very often, the happiness of others, to relieve them from pain. I have reconciled not only enemies, but lovers, I’ve cured invalids while being capable only of worsening my own illness, I’ve made idlers work while remaining idle myself.… The qualities (I tell you this quite unaffectedly

  because in other respects I have a very poor opinion of myself) which give me these chances of success on behalf of other people are, together with a certain diplomacy, a capacity for self-forgetfulness and an exclusive concentration on my friends’ welfare, qualities which are not often met with in the same person.… I felt while I was writing my book that if Swann had known me and had been able to make use of me, I should have known how to bring Odette round to him

  .

  Q: Swann and Odette?

  A: One shouldn’t necessarily equate the misfortunes of individual fictional characters with the author’s overall prognosis for human contentment. Trapped inside a novel, these unhappy characters would, after all, be the only ones unable to derive the therapeutic benefits of reading it.

  Q: Did he think that love could last forever?

  A: Well, no, but the limits to eternity didn’t lie specifically with love. They lay in the general difficulty of maintaining an appreciative relationship with anything or anyone that was always around.

  Q: What kind of difficulties?

  A: Take the unemotive example of the telephone. Bell invented it in 1876. By 1900, there were thirty thousand phones in France. Proust rapidly acquired one (tel. 29205) and particularly liked a service called the “theater-phone,” which allowed him to listen to live opera and theater in Paris venues.

  He might have appreciated his phone, but he noted how quickly everyone else began taking theirs for granted. As early as 1907, he wrote that the machine was

  a supernatural instrument before whose miracle we used to stand amazed, and which we now employ without giving it a thought, to summon our tailor or to order an ice cream

  .

  Moreover, if the confiserie had a busy line or the connection to the tailor a hum, instead of admiring the technological advances that had frustrated our sophisticated desires, we tended to react with childish ingratitude.

  Since we are children who play with divine forces without shuddering before their mystery, we only find the telephone “convenient,” or rather, as we are spoilt children, we find that “it isn’t convenient,” we fill Le Figaro with our complaints

  .

  A mere thirty-one years separated Bell’s invention from Proust’s sad observations on the state of French telephone-appreciation. It had taken a little more than three decades for a technological marvel to cease attracting admiring glances and turn into a household object that we wouldn’t hesitate to condemn were we to suffer at its hands the minor inconvenience of a delayed glace au chocolat.

  It points clearly enough to the problems faced by human beings, comparatively humdrum things, in seeking eternal, or at least life-long, appreciation from their fellows.

  Q: How long can the average human expect to be appr
eciated?

  A: Fully appreciated? Often, as little as quarter of an hour. As a boy, Proust’s narrator longs to befriend the beautiful, vivacious Gilberte, whom he has met playing in the Champs-Élysées. Eventually, his wish comes true. Gilberte becomes his friend, and invites him regularly to tea at her house. There she cuts him slices of cake, ministers to his needs, and treats him with great affection.

  He is happy, but, soon enough, not as happy as he should be. For so long, the idea of having tea in Gilberte’s house was like a vague, chimerical dream, but after quarter of an hour in her drawing room, it is the time before he knew her, before she was cutting him cake and showering him with affection, that starts to grow chimerical and vague.

  The outcome can only be a certain blindness to the favors he is enjoying. He will soon forget what there is to be grateful for because the memory of Gilberte-less life will fade, and with it, evidence of what there is to savor. The smile on Gilberte’s face, the luxury of her tea, and the warmth of her manners will eventually become such a familiar part of his life that there will be as much incentive to notice them as there is to notice omnipresent elements like trees, clouds, or telephones.

  The reason for this neglect is that, like all of us in the Proustian conception, the narrator is a creature of habit, and therefore always liable to grow contemptuous of what is familiar.

  We only really know what is new, what suddenly introduces to our sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, that for which habit has not yet substituted its pale fac-similes

  .

  Q: Why does habit have such a dulling effect?

  A: Proust’s most suggestive answer lies in a remark about the biblical Noah and his Ark:

  When I was a small child, no character in the Bible seemed to me to have a worse fate than Noah, because of the flood which kept him locked up in the Ark for forty days. Later on, I was often ill, and also had to stay in an “Ark” for endless days. It was then I understood that Noah would never have been able to see the world as well as from the Ark, even though it was shuttered and it was night on earth

  .

  How could Noah have seen anything of the planet when he was sitting in a shuttered Ark with an amphibious zoo? Though we usually assume that seeing an object requires us to have visual contact with it, and that seeing a mountain involves visiting the Alps and opening our eyes, this may only be the first, and in a sense the inferior, part of seeing, for appreciating an object properly may also require us to re-create it in our mind’s eye.

  After looking at a mountain, if we shut our lids and dwell on the scene internally, we are led to seize on its important details. The mass of visual information is interpreted and the mountain’s salient features identified: its granite peaks, its glacial indentations, the mist hovering above the tree line—details that we would previously have seen but not for that matter noticed.

  Though Noah was six hundred years old when God flooded the world, and would have had much time to look at his surroundings, the fact that they were always there, that they were so permanent in his visual field, would not have encouraged him to re-create them internally. What was the point of focusing closely on a bush in his mind’s eye when there was abundant physical evidence of bushes in the vicinity?

  How different the situation would have been after two weeks in the Ark, when, nostalgic for his old surroundings and unable to see them, Noah would naturally have begun to focus on the memory of bushes, trees, and mountains, and therefore, for the first time in his six-hundred-year life, begun to see them properly.

  Which suggests that having something physically present sets up far from ideal circumstances in which to notice it. Presence may in fact be the very element that encourages us to ignore or neglect it, because we feel we have done all the work simply in securing visual contact.

  Q: Should we spend more time locked up in Arks then?

  A: It would help us pay more attention to things, lovers in particular. Deprivation quickly drives us into a process of appreciation, which is not to say that we have to be deprived in order to appreciate things, but rather that we should learn a lesson from what we naturally do when we lack something, and apply it to conditions where we don’t.

  If long acquaintance with a lover so often breeds boredom, breeds a sense of knowing a person too well, the problem may ironically be that we do not know him or her well enough. Whereas the initial novelty of the relationship could leave us in no doubt as to our ignorance, the subsequent reliable physical presence of the lover and the routines of communal life can delude us into thinking that we have achieved genuine, and dull, familiarity; whereas it may be no more than a fake sense of familiarity that physical presence fosters, and that Noah would have felt for six hundred years in relation to the world, until the Flood taught him otherwise.

  Q: Did Proust have any relevant thoughts on dating? What should one talk about on a first date? And is it good to wear black?

  A: Advice is scant. A more fundamental doubt is whether one should accept dinner in the first place.

  There is no doubt that a person’s charms are less frequently a cause of love than a remark such as: “No, this evening I shan’t be free.”

  If this response proves bewitching, it is because of the connection made in Noah’s case between appreciation and absence. Though a person may be filled with attributes, an incentive is nevertheless required to ensure that a seducer will focus wholeheartedly on these, an incentive which finds perfect form in a dinner rebuff—the dating equivalent of forty days at sea.

  Proust demonstrates the benefits of delay in his thoughts on the appreciation of clothes. Both Albertine and the Duchesse de Guermantes are interested in fashion. However, Albertine has very little money and the Duchesse owns half of France. The Duchesse’s wardrobes are therefore overflowing; as soon as she sees something she wants, she can send for the dressmaker and her desire is fulfilled as rapidly as hands can sew. Albertine, on the other hand, can hardly buy anything, and has to think at length before she does so. She spends hours studying clothes, dreaming of a particular coat or hat or dressing gown.

  The result is that though Albertine has far fewer clothes than the Duchesse, her understanding, appreciation, and love of them is far greater.

  Like every obstacle in the way of possessing something…, poverty, more generous than opulence, gives women far more than the clothes they cannot afford to buy: the desire for those clothes which creates a genuine, detailed, thorough knowledge of them

  .

  Proust compares Albertine to a student who visits Dresden after cultivating a desire to see a particular painting, whereas the Duchesse is like a wealthy tourist who travels without any desire or knowledge, and experiences nothing but bewilderment, boredom, and exhaustion when she arrives.

  Which emphasizes the extent to which physical possession is only one component of appreciation. If the rich are fortunate in being able to travel to Dresden as soon as the desire to do so arises, or to buy a dress just after they have seen it in a catalog, they are cursed because of the speed with which their wealth fulfills their desires. No sooner have they thought of Dresden than they can be on a train there; no sooner have they seen a dress than it can be in their wardrobe. They therefore have no opportunity to suffer the interval between desire and gratification which the less privileged endure, and which, for all its apparent unpleasantness, has the incalculable benefit of allowing people to know and fall deeply in love with paintings in Dresden, hats, dressing gowns, and someone who isn’t free this evening.

  Q: Was he against sex before marriage?

  A: No, just before love. And not for any starchy reasons, simply because he felt it wasn’t a good idea to sleep together when encouraging someone to fall in love was a consideration.

  Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever possess, are the only interesting ones

  .

  Q: Surely not?

 
A: Other women may of course be fascinating, the problem is that they risk not seeming so, given what the Duchesse de Guermantes has told us about the consequences of acquiring beautiful things too easily.

  Take the case of prostitutes, a group more or less available every night. As a young man, Proust had been a compulsive masturbator, so compulsive that his father had urged him to go to a brothel, to take his mind off what the nineteenth century considered to be a highly dangerous pastime. In a candid letter to his grandfather, sixteen-year-old Marcel described how the visit had gone:

  I so badly needed to see a woman in order to stop my bad habits of masturbating that papa gave me 10 francs to go to the brothel. But, 1st in my excitement, I broke the chamber pot, 3 francs, 2nd in this same excitement, I wasn’t able to have sex. So now I’m back to square one, constantly waiting for another 10 francs to empty myself and for 3 more francs for that pot

  .

  But the brothel trip was more than a practical disaster; it revealed a conceptual problem with prostitution. The prostitute is in an unfortunate position in the Proustian theory of desire, because she both wishes to entice a man and yet is commercially prevented from doing what is most likely to encourage love—namely, tell him that she is not free tonight. She may be clever and attractive, and yet the one thing she cannot do is foster doubts as to whether he will ever possess her physically. The outcome is clear, and therefore real, lasting desire unlikely.

  If prostitutes … attract us so little, it is not because they are less beautiful than other women, but because they are ready and waiting; because they already offer us precisely what we seek to attain

  .

  Q: So he believed that sex was everything men wanted to attain?

  A: A further distinction might have to be made. The prostitute offers a man what he thinks he wants to attain; she gives him an illusion of attainment, but one which is nevertheless strong enough to threaten the gestation of love.

  To return to the Duchesse, she fails to appreciate her dresses not because they are less beautiful than other dresses, but because physical possession is so easy, which fools her into thinking that she has acquired everything she wanted, and distracts her from pursuing the only real form of possession that is effective in Proust’s eyes—namely, imaginative possession (dwelling on the details of the dress, the folds of the material, the delicacy of the thread), an imaginative possession that Albertine already pursues, through no conscious choice, because it is a natural response to being denied physical contact.