Lessons From Books: How Proust Can Change Your Life
In the book, How Proust Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton etches a narrative of self-help and self-improvement which he found in the works of Marcel Proust. Proust was a novelist known most famously for his work, In Search of Lost Time, which spans seven novels and tackles themes of friendship, success, love, relationships, and much more.
At the core, the book tries to answer the question of what is the best way to live life? Although the answer varies from individual to individual, Alain de Botton puts forth some practical ways to live one’s life and of course, as Proust was one of the most influential writers, the book is also rich in literary advice.
The lessons:
On Life — Learn To Be A “Good Sufferer”
We suffer, therefore we think, and we do so because thinking helps us place pain in context. It helps us to understand its origins, plot its dimensions, and reconcile ourselves to its presence. (Alain de Botton)
Life is hard and an important aspect of living is to be a good sufferer. You must be able to detach from grief and to understand why something hurts you or harms you.
Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our hearts. (Proust)
When we can learn from grief, then the pain subsides. In order to learn from it, we must accept it at first and not avoid it.
Perhaps the greatest claim one can make for suffering is that it opens up possibilities for intelligent, imaginative inquiry — -possibilities that may quite easily be, and most often are, overlooked or refused. (Alain de Botton)
I found this to be similar to Jocko Willink’s “Good” method of dealing with hardship.
On Life — Be Observant
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new sights, but in looking with new eyes. (Proust)
Daily life can seem mundane and unimportant. We are too busy living for the weekend or for the summer vacations that most of our life can drift by without notice. Which is why Proust emphasized searching for the unique or the precious in everyday life. This mindset requires one to be observant, to look at your everyday life with new eyes.
When you walk around a kitchen, you will say to yourself this is interesting, this is grand, this is beautiful like Chordin. (Proust)
This is similar to Walker Percy’s idea of The Search which he explored in his novel, The Moviegoer. This can make the everyday special and unique.
Aesthetically, the number of human types is so restricted that we must constantly, wherever we may be, have the pleasure of seeing people we know. (Proust)
In the train rides or bus ride, while waiting in lines at convenient stores or walking around in malls, if we are observant enough we can find people we know and love because humans share similar features, traits, and habits.
For appreciating an object properly may also require us to re-create it in our mind’s eye.” (Proust)
On Writing — Be Original and Care Deeply
Every writer is obliged to create his own language, as every violinist is obliged to create his own tone. (Proust)
An artist should not have an obsession with continuing the style that has been going on but rather he or she should study it and then adapt it to him or herself instead of them adapting to the style. In order to do this, the artist must have faith in their own abilities.
It’s quite true that the sky is on fire at sunset, but it’s been said too often, and the moon that shines discreetly is a trifle dull. (Proust)
Proust says that what makes something great isn’t the subject matter but rather the quality of care given to that subject. Cliches show a concern for the end product rather than the process of creation. The process of creation requires patience, attention, and care.
Remainder to myself: Write without care and edit with an abundance of it.
Great Lines or Quotes:
In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. (Proust)
Everything is potentially a fertile subject for art and that we can make discoveries as valuable in an advertisement for soap as in Pascal’s Pensees. (Alain de Botton)
Those who love and those who are happy are not the same. (Proust)
When we discover the true lives of other people, the real world beneath the world of appearance, we get as many surprises as on visiting a house of plain exterior which inside is full of hidden treasures, torture-chambers or skeletons. (Proust)
Our notion of reality is at variance with actual reality, because it is so often shaped by inadequate or misleading accounts. (Alain de Botton)
We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel’ it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thoughts that help us do so. (Proust)
To make (reading) into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it. (Proust)