How Proust Can Change Your Life

The doctors in Proust’s novel inspire little more confidence. When the narrator’s grandmother is taken ill, her worried family summons a renowned and celebrated medical figure, the Docteur du Boulbon. Though the grandmother is in extraordinary pain, du Boulbon conducts a rapid examination before deciding that he has hit upon the perfect solution.

“You will be cured, Madame, on the day, whenever it comes—and it rests entirely with you whether it comes

today—on which you realise that there is nothing wrong with you and resume your ordinary life. You tell me that you have not been eating, not going out?”

“But, Doctor, I have a temperature.”

“Not just now at any rate. Besides, what a splendid excuse! Don’t you know that we feed up tuberculosis patients with temperatures of 102 and keep them out in the open air?”

Unable to resist the arguments of this exalted medical man, the grandmother forces herself out of bed, takes her grandson with her, and painfully negotiates her way to the Champs-Élysées for the sake of fresh air. Naturally, the trip kills her.

Should a convinced Proustian ever visit a doctor? Marcel, the son and brother of surgeons, ended up with an equivocal, even surprisingly generous, verdict on the profession:

To believe in medicine would be the height of folly, if not to believe in it were not a greater folly still

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Proustian logic would nevertheless point to the wisdom of seeking out doctors who are themselves frequently afflicted by grave illness.

It now seems as if the magnitude of Proust’s misfortunes should not be allowed to cast doubt on the validity of his ideas. Indeed, it is the very extent of his suffering that we should take to be evidence of the perfect precondition for insights. It is when we hear that Proust’s lover died in a plane crash off the coast of Antibes, or that Stendhal endured a series of agonizing unrequited passions, or that Nietzsche was a social outcast taunted by schoolboys, that we can be reassured of having discovered valuable intellectual authorities. It is not the contented or the glowing who have left many of the profound testimonies of what it means to be alive. It seems that such knowledge has usually been the privileged preserve of, and the only blessing granted to, the violently miserable.

Nevertheless, before subscribing uncritically to a Romantic cult of suffering, it should be added that suffering has, on its own, never been quite enough. It is, unfortunately, easier to lose a lover than complete In Search of Lost Time, to experience unrequited desire than write De l’amour, to be socially unpopular than the author of The Birth of Tragedy. Many unhappy syphilitics omit to write their Fleurs du mal, and shoot themselves instead. Perhaps the greatest claim one can therefore 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.

How can we do neither? Even if the creation of a masterpiece plays no part in the ambition, how can we learn to suffer more successfully? Though philosophers have traditionally been concerned with the pursuit of happiness, far greater wisdom would seem to lie in pursuing ways to be properly and productively unhappy. The stubborn recurrence of misery means that the development of a workable approach to it must surely outstrip the value of any utopian quest for happiness. Proust, a veteran of grief, knew as much.

The whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we suffer

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What would such an art of living involve? For a Proustian, the task is to gain a better understanding of reality. Pain is surprising: we cannot understand why we have been abandoned in love or left off an invitation list, why we are unable to sleep at night or wander through pollinating meadows in spring. Identifying reasons for such discomforts does not spectacularly absolve us of pain, but it may form the principal basis of a recovery. While assuring us that we are not uniquely cursed, understanding grants us a sense of the boundaries to, and bitter logic behind, our suffering.