How Proust Can Change Your Life

There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or even lived in a way which was so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. But he shouldn’t regret this entirely, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man—so far as any of us can be wise—unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be reached. I know there are young people … whose teachers have instilled in them a nobility of mind and moral refinement from the very beginning of their schooldays. They perhaps have nothing to retract when they look back upon their lives; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake for us, an effort which no one can spare us

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Why can’t they? Why is this painful journey so indispensable to the acquisition of true wisdom? Elstir does not specify, though it may be enough that he has defined a relationship between the degree of pain a person experiences and the profundity of thought he or she may have as a result. It is as if the mind were a squeamish organ that refused to entertain difficult truths unless encouraged to do so by difficult events. “Happiness is good for the body,” Proust tells us, “but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind.” These griefs put us through a form of mental gymnastics which we would have avoided in happier times. Indeed, if a genuine priority is the development of our mental capacities, the implication is that we would be better off being unhappy than content, better off pursuing tormented love affairs than reading Plato or Spinoza.

A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and more vital than does a man of genius who interests us

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It is perhaps only normal if we remain ignorant when things are blissful. When a car is working well, what incentive is there to learn of its complex internal functioning? When a beloved pledges loyalty, why should we dwell on the dynamics of human treachery? What could encourage us to investigate the humiliations of social life when all we encounter is respect? Only when plunged into grief do we have the Proustian incentive to confront difficult truths, as we wail under the bedclothes, like branches in the autumn wind.

This may explain Proust’s suspicion of doctors. Doctors are in an awkward position according to the Proustian theory of knowledge, for they are people who profess to understand the workings of the body, even though their knowledge has not primarily emerged from any pain in their own body. They have merely attended years of medical school.

It was the arrogance of this position which rankled the ever-ailing Proust, an arrogance all the more unfounded given the shaky foundations of medical knowledge in his day. As a child, he had been sent to see a certain Dr. Martin, who claimed to have discovered a permanent cure for asthma. It involved burning off the erectile tissue of the nose in a two-hour-long session. “You can go off to the countryside now,” an assured Dr. Martin told young Proust after he had inflicted this painful operation on him. “You cannot have hay fever any longer.” But, of course, at the first sight of a lilac in bloom, Proust was assaulted by such a violent, lengthy attack of asthma that his hands and feet turned purple and there were fears for his life.