How Proust Can Change Your Life

It seems difficult to argue that soapy bliss is truly as significant as Pascal’s Pensées. But such was not Proust’s intention; he was merely saying that a soap advertisement could be the starting point for thoughts which might end up being no less profound than those already well-expressed, already well-developed in the Pensées. If we were unlikely to have had deep thoughts inspired by toilet soaps before, it could merely have been out of adherence to conventional notions about where to have such thoughts, a resistance to the spirit that had guided Flaubert in turning a newspaper story about the suicide of a young wife into Madame Bovary, or the spirit that had guided Proust in taking on the initially unprepossessing topic of falling asleep and devoting thirty pages to it.

A similar spirit appears to have guided Proust in his reading matter. His friend Maurice Duplay tells us that what Marcel most liked reading when he couldn’t get to sleep was a train timetable.

The document was not consulted for practical advice; the departure time of the Saint-Lazare train was of no immediate importance to a man who found no reason to leave Paris in the last eight years of his life. Rather, this timetable was read and enjoyed as though it were a gripping novel about country life, because the mere names of provincial train stations provided Proust’s imagination with enough material to elaborate entire worlds, to picture domestic dramas in rural villages, shenanigans in local government, and life out in the fields.

Proust argued that enjoyment of such wayward reading matter was typical of a writer, someone who could be counted on to develop enthusiasms for things that were apparently out of line with great art, a person for whom

a terrible musical production in a provincial theatre, or a ball which people of taste find ridiculous, will either evoke memories or else be linked to an order of reveries and preoccupations, far more than some admirable performance at the Opéra or an ultra smart soirée in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. The names of northern railway stations in a timetable, where he would like to imagine himself stepping from the train on an autumn evening, when the trees are already bare and smelling strongly in the keen air, an insipid publication for people of taste, full of names he has not heard since childhood, may have far greater value for him than fine volumes of philosophy, and lead people of taste to say that for a man of talent, he has very stupid tastes

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Or at least, unconventional tastes. This often became apparent to people who met Proust for the first time and were quizzed on aspects of their life which they had previously considered with all the meager spiritual attention usually paid to ads for household goods and timetables from Paris to Le Havre.

In 1919 the young diplomat Harold Nicolson was introduced to Proust at a party at the Ritz. Nicolson had been posted to Paris with the British Delegation at the peace conference following the Great War, an assignment he found interesting, but clearly not as interesting as Proust ended up finding it. In his diary, Nicolson reported of the party: