Marcel Proust as Life Coach?

Gifts of Chance

Quite haphazardly I came upon a unique little non-fiction book entitled How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton (London: Picador, 1997).  It came with a cottage we were renting in Provence, France, along with a little trove of art books, travel guides, some good novels and an assortment biographiesm history, philosophy, and self-exploration books.  What a delight to find all this, as if it were  waiting for me. I emailed the owners telling them how grateful I was for this gift of chance.

I so enjoyed the little book on Proust that I wanted to share it with you. Like the novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog by French author and philosophy professor Muriel Barbery (another unexpected find  enjoyed years ago in Europe), this book on Proust reminds me of how witty and socially relevant erudition can be. Also, how important it is to step away from one's usually crowded state of mind, to let things as they are enter in without full attention. Add a dose of humour, rational optimism plus practical pessimism, and you're set for life.

Marcel Proust as Life Coach

This charming, amusing, and sensible little book was reviewed as "dazzling" by John Updike. It concerns the eccentric and very generous Marcel Proust, who wrote what has been hailed as the, or at least one of the, greatest books of the 20th century: In Search of Lost Time (Recherches Des Temps Perdu (sometimes translated as Remembrance of Things Past)). This a  long book that  I've never read fully from cover to cover,  though I've enjoyed much of it by repeatedly reading from it

Even without having read Proust, one can enjoy de Botton's commentary. It seems Proust thought and wrote enough  to enrich, not just literature, but also a philosophy of everyday life.

Probably few of us would choose to exchange our life for Marcel Proust's. He has often been considered a dilettante, hypochondriac, and neurotic who spent most of his later adult days in bed as an apparent invalid. Even so, Proust was one of the most alive people of his time, generous to a fault, socializing with friends, possessing an extraordinary concentration and attentiveness  -- an elusive quality then, and especially now, in our time of multiple distractions, our impatience with even relevant details and wholesale avoidance of complex perspectives.

Proust collage by Janet Strayer

Take Your Time

One chapter, for example, is entitled, "How to Take Your Time."  One of the gifts of great novels, like Recherches, is the time one can spend inside them: reacting to their characters, settings, happenings, living in the inner and outer worlds created by the author and in which we partake. If we don't take the time, we miss the trip. 

N'allez pas trop vite is a request often attributed to Proust in conversation with his contemporaries. His request that we go about things more slowly increases the chances of coming to know and enjoy those otherwise unnoticed things that become interesting in the process of taking our time with them. In contrast to anger, annoyance, impatience, and easy judgments, which we know are so quick and easily come by, it takes time to become engaged, to explore how we really feel, to experience empathy, and to understand.

As de Boton notes , why bother reading Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina, or Madame Bovary if these novels can be summarized like passing social-media headlines. These are examples he gives for each (pp.42-43): 

  "Tragic end for Verona lovebirds: after mistakenly thinking his sweetheart dead, a young man took his life. Having discovered the fate of her lover, the woman killed herself"; 

"A young mother threw herself under a train and died in Russia after domestic problems";

 A young mother took aresenic and died in a French provincial town after domestic problems." 

How many of us are addicted to the quick and fast bottom-line? Our culture increasingly challenges our ability to concentrate by promoting more distraction, more information that is non-informative, and  highly-revved but empty spectacles. We tend to get bored and impatient with the slow-moving and we habituate to being distracted, quickly losing interest and looking elsewhere  rather than actively becoming engaged . Give me that video-game!

Suffer Successfully

De Botton selectively uses Proust to address common tribulations of being human, as in his chapter on "How to Suffer Successfully." Human suffering seems inevitable,  but Proust presents a differentiation in his characters between good sufferers (who gain more understanding and appreciation of reality from it) and bad sufferers. The latter blame others for their suffering, distract themselves from it with quick-fix addictions, delusions about self and others, or defences that entail arrogance callousness, anger, and spite. Armed heavily in this way, bad sufferers have little incentive to face difficult truths, change as needed, and more fully appreciate their life.

Finding One's Own Way

Finding one's own way, one's own voice, vision, and what one truly  loves is, for me, the vast theme of my readings of Proust. He hated clichés and orthodoxies: "Every writer is obliged to create his own language, as every violinist is obliged to create his own tone" (p.103) and "only that which bears the imprint of our choice, our taste, our uncertainty, our desire and our weakness can be beautiful" (p.104). Except for deliberate caricature and melodrama, why borrow tired forms of expression?  

Looking to Proust's time, as well as our own, one reasonable rebuttal would be: because otherwise we risk not fitting in or might be judged harshly. Though there have always been those who flout convention, Proust's point isn't to make a name for ourselves by pissing on monuments. The point is to take the time to consider and learn for ourself (not by convention or fan-group) what we need and need to do  for our own particular right path. Courage over time.

Visual Art

Visual art is significant in Proust's novels. One of his characters, Elstir, is an impressionist painter. His paintings, like those of actual Impressionists at the time, challenged the orthodox understanding of what things looked like and what was considered beautiful. 

It might be quite a stretch to apply Proust's magnanimous point of view about artists, especially if you know some first-hand. But what he says about the creative process is authentic. For Proust, painting, like other art forms, serves to undo "our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits" and makes us "travel back...to the depths to see what has been neglected or distorted (p. 112).

Beauty

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder: where is that eye looking? Not just in the obvious places and pre-determined images received from culture and celebrity branding. 

Proust guides us to actively looking and attentiveness to our impressions: a particular blueness, or a reflection of light that strikes us.  Such active engagement, attentive looking, listening, and sensing --in reality or imagination -- takes time and some degree of dedicated inclination or effort. That's why being an appreciator of art of any kind of art   is such a gift in itself. We needn't be the painter or composer if we can appreciate the beauty of the painting or the music. 

Beauty can be quite modest and subtle in its effects. Given our drama and sensation-charged media, we might often miss out on it  I recall the fuss a long time ago over the Met's then outlandishly expensive purchase of a Rembrandt. When I went to see it as a child, expecting a great blaze of beauty to strike me, I was so disappointed. It looked to me just some highlights on an old person standing in the dark. So I looked to more ostentatious paintings for the WOW I expected from the beautiful. It took a bit more time and looking for me to learn that beautiful qualities in art (or people) didn't fit conspicuous categories. WOW still works for me, but  hardly cuts it any more as a criterion for beauty or meaning.   

Often there's very little at first glance to distinguish a good painting from an indifferent one a. Bad paintings might depict clouds well, or display some impressive technique, or so loudly declare something that they get noticed. Yet, in Proust's sense, they lack an elusive specialness. Looked at repeatedly they become rather boring, with nothing further revealed in the play of small details, or in qualities of light and contrast, or a particular touch that continues to engage us as we look more.

Habit  tends to erode beauty. You stop looking attentively at what's routine -- even that beautiful painting you were fortunate enough to get. As Virginia Woolf said, beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful. We can't ever presume to know it too well.

How to Open Your Eyes: All the light we cannot see

"How to open your eyes" is another chapter in this commentary upon Proust's lessons for us. 

detail of still life painted in Provence by Janet Strayer

Proust encourages us to use paintings as examples: scenes of ordinary fruit and kitchen ware, of ordinary people doing ordinary things in contrast with the heroic (on the one hand) or the picturesque (on the other). In our day, the sensationally vulgar versus kitsch might replace Proust's heroic versus picturesque contrast. Still, the message holds: simple and ordinary things can be wonderfully, aesthetically, beautiful.

Proust may have over-valued painters. He wrote "I have tried to show how the great painters initiate us into a knowledge and love of the external world, how they are the ones by whom our eyes are opened'" (p.150, quoted by de Botton).

Proust understood that we need the arts. They help us bridge the gaps, even fill the holes, between our immediate circumstances and something we need that is deeper, wider,  richer, stronger and, yes, beautiful. In so doing, our life also changes, in moments and bits of attention as we look for and are enriched by what is, for us, special.

All the light we cannot see is a lovely metaphor and the title of a fine novel by Anthony Doerr. Well worth reading for its own sake, and  also meaningful in this context. The arts can enhance our perceptions and meaningfully link to our lives even if we are blind (as is the girl in this book) and however bleak our situation. Some courage and humility help: a dedicated willingness to attend, remain open, look, listen, seek, acknowledge and appreciate,  again... and again. Other people, like these authors, can also help by promoting and supporting such efforts.  

More Creative Life News

You can read and see more about creative life, travels, tips and creative adventures by this itinerant artist at Creative Life News at https://www.janetstrayer.com

Regards, Janet