How Proust Can Change Your Life

FIRST: how much is on our minds—in particular, how many thoughts we have about our friends which, though true, could potentially be hurtful and, though honest, could seem unkind.

SECOND: our evaluation of how ready others would be to break off a friendship if ever we dared express these honest thoughts to them—an evaluation made in part according to our sense of how lovable we are, and of whether our qualities would be enough to ensure that we could stay friends with people even if we had momentarily irritated them by revealing our disapproval of their fiancée or lyric poetry.

Unfortunately, by both criteria, Proust was not well placed to enjoy honest friendships. For a start, he had far too many true but unkind thoughts about people. When he met a palm reader in 1918, the woman was said to have taken a glance at his hand, looked at his face for a moment, then remarked simply, “What do you want from me, Monsieur? It should be you reading my character.” But this miraculous understanding of others did not lead to cheerful conclusions. “I feel infinite sadness at seeing how few people are genuinely kind,” he said, and judged that most people had something rather wrong with them.

The most perfect person in the world has a certain defect which shocks us or makes us angry. One man is of rare intelligence, sees everything from the loftiest viewpoint, never speaks ill of anyone, but will pocket and forget letters of supreme importance which he himself asked you to let him post for you, and so makes you miss a vital engagement without offering you any excuse, with a smile, because he prides himself upon never knowing the time. Another is so refined, so gentle, so delicate in his conduct that he never says anything to you about yourself that you

would not be glad to hear, but you feel that he suppresses, that he keeps buried in his heart, where they turn sour, other, quite different opinions

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Lucien Daudet felt that Proust possessed

an unenviable power of divination, he discovered all the pettiness, often hidden, of the human heart, and it horrified him: the most insignificant lies, the mental reservations, the secrecies, the fake disinterestedness, the kind word which has an ulterior motive, the truth which has been slightly deformed for convenience, in short, all the things which worry us in love, sadden us in friendship and make our dealings with others banal were for Proust a subject of constant surprise, sadness or irony

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It is regrettable, as far as the cause of honest friendship was concerned, that Proust combined this heightened awareness of others’ faults with unusually strong doubts about his own chances of being liked (“Oh! Making a nuisance of myself, that has always been my nightmare”), and about the chances of retaining his friends if ever he were to express his more negative thoughts to them. His previously diagnosed case of low self-esteem (“If only I could value myself more! Alas! It is impossible”) bred an exaggerated notion of how friendly he would need to be in order to have any friends. And though he was in disagreement with all the more exalted claims made on friendship’s behalf, he was still deeply concerned with securing affection (“My only consolation when I am really sad is to love and to be loved”). Under a heading of “thoughts that spoil friendship,” Proust confessed to a range of anxieties familiar to any quotidian emotional paranoiac: “What did they think of us?” “Were we not tactless?” “Did they like us?” as well as “the fear of being forgotten in favour of someone else.”