How Proust Can Change Your Life

“He was the best of listeners. Even in his intimate circle his constant care to be modest and polite prevented him from pushing himself forward and from imposing subjects of conversation. These he found in others’ thoughts. Sometimes he spoke about sport and motor-cars and showed a touching desire for information. He took an interest in you, instead of trying to make you interested in himself.” GEORGES DE LAURIS

THAT HE WAS CURIOUS:

“Marcel was passionately interested in his friends. Never have I seen less egoism, or egotism.… He wanted to amuse you. He was happy to see others laughing and he laughed.” GEORGES DE LAURIS

THAT HE DIDN’T FORGET WHAT WAS IMPORTANT:

“Never, right up to the end, neither his frenzied work, nor his suffering made him forget his friends—because he certainly never put all his poetry into his books, he put as much into his life.” WALTER BERRY

THAT HE WAS MODEST:

“What modesty! You apologised for everything: for being present, for speaking, for being quiet, for thinking, for expressing your dazzlingly meandering thoughts, even for lavishing your incomparable praise.” ANNA DE NOAILLES

THAT HE WAS A GREAT TALKER:

“One can never say it enough: Proust’s conversation was dazzling, bewitching.” MARCEL PLANTEVIGNES

THAT ONE NEVER GOT BORED AT HIS HOUSE:

“During dinner, he would carry his plate over to each guest; he would eat soup next to one, the fish, or half a fish besides another, and so on until the end of a meal; one can imagine that by the fruit, he had gone all the way around. It was testimony of kindness, of good will towards everyone, because he would have been distraught that anyone would have wanted to complain; and he thought both to make a gesture of individual politeness and to assure, with his usual perspicacity, that everyone was in an agreeable mood. Indeed, the results were excellent, and one never got bored at his house.” GABRIEL DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

Given such generous verdicts, it is surprising to find that Proust held some extremely caustic views about friendship—in fact, to find that he had an unusually limited conception of the value of his, or indeed of anyone’s friendships. Despite the dazzling conversation and dinner parties, he believed:

THAT HE COULD JUST AS WELL HAVE BEFRIENDED A SETTEE:

“The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist (our friends being friends only in the light of an agreeable folly which travels with us through life and to which we readily accommodate ourselves, but which at the bottom of our hearts we know to be no more reasonable than the delusion of the man who talks to the furniture because he believes that it is alive).”

THAT TALKING IS A FUTILE ACTIVITY:

“Conversation, which is friendship’s mode of expression, is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute.”

THAT FRIENDSHIP IS A SHALLOW EFFORT:

“… directed towards making us sacrifice the only part of ourselves that is real and incommunicable (otherwise than by means of art) to a superficial self.”

AND THAT FRIENDSHIP IS IN THE END NO MORE THAN:

“… a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone.”

It doesn’t mean he was callous. It doesn’t mean he was a misanthrope. It doesn’t mean he never had an urge to see friends (an urge he described as a “craving to see people which attacks both men and women and inspires a longing to throw himself out of the window in the patient who has been shut away from his family and friends in an isolation clinic).”

However, Proust was challenging all the more exalted claims made on friendship’s behalf. Principal among these is the claim that our friends afford us a chance to express our deepest selves, and that the conversations we have with them are a privileged forum in which to say what we really think and, by extension and with no mystical allusion, be who we really are.

The claim was not dismissed out of a bitter disappointment with the caliber of his friends. Proust’s skepticism had nothing to do with the presence at his dinner table of intellectually sluggish characters like Gabriel de La Rochefoucauld, who needed to be entertained while he circulated with a half-eaten plate of fish in his hand. The problem was more universal; it was inherent in the idea of friendship and would have been present even if he had had a chance to share his thoughts with the most profound minds of his generation, even if he had, for instance, been given the opportunity to converse with a writer of James Joyce’s genius.