How Proust Can Change Your Life

RESPONSE TO PROBLEM: Searching for the culprit, Swann considers each of his friends in turn, Monsieur de Charlus, Monsieur des Laumes, Monsieur d’Orsan, but cannot believe any of them capable of sending this letter. Then, having been unable to bring himself to suspect anyone, Swann begins to think more critically, and decides that everyone he knows could in fact have written the letter. What is he to think? How should he evaluate his friends? The cruel letter is an invitation to Swann to pursue a deeper understanding of people.

This anonymous letter proved that he knew a human being capable of the most infamous conduct, but he could see no more reason why that infamy should lurk in the unfathomed depths of the character of the man with the warm heart rather than the cold, the artist rather than the bourgeois, the noble rather than the flunky. What criterion ought one to adopt to judge human beings? After all, there was not a single person he knew who might not, in certain circumstances, prove capable of shameful action. Must he then cease to see them all? His mind grew clouded; he drew his hands two or three times across his brow, wiped his glasses with his handkerchief.… And he continued to shake hands with all the friends whom he had suspected, with the purely formal reservation that each one of them had possibly thought to drive him to despair

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A BETTER SOLUTION: Swann has been made to suffer by the letter, but the suffering has led to no greater understanding. He may have shed a layer of sentimental innocence, he now knows that the surface behavior of his friends may belie a darker interior, but he has found no way of identifying its signs or indeed its origins. His mind has grown clouded, he has wiped his glasses, and he has missed out on what, for Proust, is the finest thing about betrayal and jealousy—its ability to generate the intellectual motivation necessary to investigate the hidden sides of others.

Though we sometimes suspect that people are hiding things from us, it is not until we are in love that we feel an urgency to press our inquiries, and in seeking answers, we are apt to discover the extent to which people disguise and conceal their real lives.

It is one of the powers of jealousy to reveal to us the extent to which the reality of external facts and the emotions of the heart are an unknown element which lends itself to endless suppositions. We imagine that we know exactly what things are and people think, for the simple reason that we do not care about them. But as soon as we have a desire to know, as the jealous man has, then it becomes a kaleidoscope in which we can no longer distinguish anything

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Swann may know as a general truth that life is full of contrasts, but in the case of each person he knows, he trusts that those parts of a life with which he is not familiar must be identical with the parts with which he is. He understands what is hidden from him in the light of what is revealed, and therefore understands nothing of Odette, difficult as it is to accept that a woman who seems so respectable when she is with him could be the same person who once frequented brothels. Similarly, he understands nothing of his friends, for it is hard to accept that someone with whom he entertained an amiable conversation at lunch could by dinnertime have addressed a hurtful letter filled with crude revelations about his lover’s past.