How Proust Can Change Your Life

The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening

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Feeling suddenly attached to life when we realize the imminence of death suggests that it was perhaps not life itself which we had lost the taste for so long as there was no end in sight, but our quotidian version of it, that our dissatisfactions were more the result of a certain way of living than of anything irrevocably morose about human experience. Having surrendered the customary belief in our own immortality, we would then be reminded of a host of untried possibilities lurking beneath the surface of an apparently undesirable, apparently eternal existence.

However, if due acknowledgment of our mortality encourages us to reevaluate our priorities, we may well ask what these priorities should be. We might only have been living a half-life before we faced up to the implications of death, but what exactly does a whole life consist of? Simple recognition of our inevitable demise does not guarantee that we will latch on to any sensible answers when it comes to filling in what remains of the diary. Panicked by the ticking of the clock, we may even resort to some spectacular follies. The suggestions sent by the Parisian celebrities to L’Intransigeant were contradictory enough: admiration of alpine scenery, contemplation of the extraterrestrial future, tennis, golf. But were any of these fruitful ways to pass the time before the continent disintegrated?

Proust’s own suggestions (Louvre, love, India) were no more helpful. For a start, they were at odds with what one knows of his character. He had never been an avid museum visitor, he hadn’t been to the Louvre in over a decade, and preferred to look at reproductions rather than face the chatter of a museum crowd (“People think the love of literature, painting and music has become extremely widespread, whereas there isn’t a single person who knows anything about them”). Nor was he known for his interest in the Indian sub continent, which was a trial to reach, requiring a train down to Marseilles, a mail boat to Port Said, and ten days on a P&O liner across the Arabian Sea, hardly an ideal itinerary for a man with difficulty stepping out of bed. As for Miss X, to his mother’s distress, Marcel had never proved receptive to her charms, nor to those of the Misses A to Z; and it was a long time since he had bothered to ask if there was a younger brother at hand, having concluded that a glass of well-chilled beer offered a more reliable source of pleasure than lovemaking.

But even if he had wanted to act according to his proposals, Proust turned out to have little chance. Only four months after sending his answer to L’Intransigeant, having predicted that something like this would happen for years, he caught a cold and died. He was fifty-one. He had been invited to a party and, despite the symptoms of a mild flu, he wrapped himself in three coats and two blankets and went out all the same. On his way home, he had to wait in a glacial courtyard for a taxi, and there caught a chill. It developed into a high fever that might have been contained if Proust hadn’t refused to take the advice of doctors summoned to his bedside. Fearing that they would disrupt his work, he turned down their offer of camphorated oil injections, and continued to write, failing to eat or drink anything besides hot milk, coffee, and stewed fruit. The cold turned into bronchitis, which snowballed into pneumonia. Hopes of recovery were briefly raised when he sat up in bed and requested a grilled sole, but by the time the fish was bought and cooked, he was seized by nausea and was unable to touch it. He died a few hours later from a burst abscess in his lung.

Fortunately, Proust’s reflections on how to live were not limited to an all-too-brief and somewhat confusing reply to a fanciful question from a newspaper—because, right up to his death, he had been at work on a book that set out to answer, albeit in a rather extended and narratively complex form, a question not dissimilar to the one provoked by the predictions of the fictional American scientist.