Multi-Disciplinary Reading – Book Reviews

How Proust can change your life, Alan De Botton, 1997 – This is an author I have grown to like after reading his hilarious and insightful work “Essays in Love”. This is however a completely different work where he examines Proust’s works as one would examine a glass of fine wine. Proust, for the uninitiated, wrote the seven volume magnum opus “In Search of Lost Time” that is acknowledged to be a classic. It is incredibly long, incorrigibly slow (even for its time in early 1900s) and probably a book pretty much no one currently has the time for. Proust was a hypochondriac who never left his room and stayed in bed unless completely necessary to leave it and wrote in great depth from memory and made time slow down to a stop where a single scene might go on for over 100 pages, almost like a still life painting. This book was a delightful read examining this great work almost playfully.

My notes –

• Proust’s seven volume In Search of Lost Time (ISoLT) had the search for the causes for dissipation and loss of time as its central theme

• Every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self (in communion with the book, the reader discovers himself, rather than what the author says)

• Art affects, rather than distracts

• When two people part, its the one that is not in love that makes the tender speeches

• One of In Search of Lost Time’s (ISoLT) defining, awkward features is its length. One must have been very ill or broken a leg to have read it

• First 30 pages of the book (ISoLT) describes the author tossing and turning, trying to fall asleep (I remember wondering what the heck is this while reading it but slowly the book took me in and kept me there, back in 2010)

• Greatness of a work of art has nothing to do with the subject matter but the treatment of it

• Proust enjoyed reading train timetables when he couldn’t get sleep

• By not going too fast we give the world a chance to get interesting

• The self-satisfaction felt by “busy” men, however idiotic their business, at not having time…

• A good way of evaluating wisdom of someone’s ideas might be to examine the state of their own mind and health. If someone had to reap its benefits, it should at least be its creator

• Proust was very attached to Mme Proust (mother). She was well-meaning but bossy. A young Proust would write letters to her and leave it by her door for her to find in the morning (The first 100 pages of ISoLT vol 1: Swann’s way explores this bond)

• Mme Proust preferred for her son to be ill and dependent, rather than healthy and well – enacting a nurse-patient relationship

• “Even though you are 50, you are same as I first knew you, namely a spoilt child” – Proust’s stockbroker

• Feeling things (often painfully) is linked at some level with the acquisition of knowledge

• We don’t really learning anything properly, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we hoped

• Thoughts can be painless (Arising out of no particular discomfort, other than a disinterested wish to find out say, how sleep works or why people forget) or painful (arising out of distressing inability to sleep or even remember a name). Proust had the privilege of the latter

• Wisdom cannot be taught, we have to discover it for ourselves

• Philosophers should concern themselves with being “properly and productively unhappy”, rather than in the pursuit of happiness

• A woman felt faint in the library not since she was averse to books but that she sought their knowledge by wanting to have read them all at once. Surrounded by books, she developed the urge to flee her unbearable ignorance to a less knowledge-laden environment

• Peppering French with bits of English was how you seemed smart and in the know in 1900s France

• Problem with cliches is not that they contain false ideas, but that they are superficial articulation of very good ones

• Way we speak is linked to the way we feel. How we describe the world is linked to how we experience it

• Cliched phrases are a caricature of fineness, pompous ornamentation stolen by an author of later period to suggest literary grandeur

• Cliches are problematic since the world contains a far broader range of rainfalls, moons, sunshine and emotions than stock expressions can capture

• Every successful work of art restores to our sight a distorted or neglected aspect of reality

• Conversation gives us little room to refine what we want to say as writing does. We have a tendency to not know what we want to say until we have had at least one go at saying it

• We feel gossip about ourselves to be soaked in malice when we dont attribute any malice to the last person we gossiped about

• Proust preferred reading than spending time with his author friends since he could put away Moliere as if he had neither genius nor celebrity when he was bored of him

• Most interesting would be the letters we finish and don’t send than ones we do (Proust had a lot of nasty unsent letters discovered after his death)

• ISoLT was like an unusually long unsent letter where the unsayable was granted expression

• Our dissatisfactions maybe a result of our way of looking at our lives, rather than anything inherently deficient in them. Emphasis on perspective, rather than possession

• Chardin’s salt cellars and jugs, Elstir’s cotton dresses and harbours and Proust’s madeleine evoking memories of childhood – such modesty is the characteristic of beauty (Proust would have perhaps approved of Raymond Carver’s style of writing)

• Presence of a thing may be the very element that encourages us to neglect or ignore it. Real form of possession according to Proust is “imaginative possession”

• To bring back to life, from the deadness of habit and inattention, valuable yet neglected aspects of experience (The way Carver would describe a kitchen counter for eg.)

• It is our own thoughts we develop even as we read another person’s words

• Capacity for insights in one topic does not mean worthwhile insights in another area, although it is natural for us to be misled so. (like VCs writing on finance)

• A good book may nearly silence us as a writer. It might strike us as so perfect as to be inherently superior to anything we might come up with. (Virginia Woolf was nearly silenced by Proust)

• Food has a privileged role in Proust’s writings. It is lovingly described and appreciatively eaten

• A genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, rather than look at his world through our eyes

• Even the finest books deserve to be thrown aside

When you don’t have the time and resources to travel, you might delight in the narrated experiences of an adventurer or a travel blogger. In a similar fashion, if you don’t have the luxury of time, patience and taste to devour Proust, this is the closest you can get to understanding what’s so great about his work. This however, is not a one-dimensional singing of praises but a equal parts hilarious, dispassionate and critical dissection of Proust. 9/10