How Proust Can Change Your Life

In fact, the exaggerated scale of Proust’s social politeness should not blind us to the degree of insincerity every friendship demands, the ever-present requirement to deliver an affable but hollow word to a friend who proudly shows us a volume of her poetry or her newborn baby. To call such politeness hypocrisy is to neglect that we have lied in a local way not in order to conceal fundamentally malevolent intentions, but rather, to confirm our feeling of affection, which might have been doubted if there had been no gasping and praising, because of the unusual intensity of people’s attachment to their verse and children. There seems a gap between what others need to hear from us in order to trust that we like them, and the extent of the negative thoughts we know we can feel toward them and still like them. We know it is possible to think of someone as both dismal at poetry and perceptive, both inclined to pomposity and charming, both suffering from halitosis and genial. But the susceptibility of others means that the negative part of the equation can rarely be expressed without jeopardizing the union. We usually believe gossip about ourselves to have been inspired by a level of malice far greater (or more critical) than the malice we ourselves felt in relation to the last person we gossiped about, a person whose habits we could mock without this in any way altering our affection for them.

Proust once compared friendship to reading, because both activities involved communion with others, but added that reading had a key advantage:

In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original purity. There is no false amiability with books. If we spend the evening with these friends, it is because we genuinely want to

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Whereas in life, we are often led to have dinner because we fear for the future of a valued friendship were we to decline the invitation, a hypocritical meal forced upon us by an awareness of our friends’ unwarranted, yet unavoidable, susceptibility. How much more honest we can be with books. There, at least, we can turn to them when we want, and look bored or cut short a dialogue as soon as necessary. Had we been granted the opportunity to spend an evening with Moliere, even this comic genius would have forced us into an occasional fake smile, which is why Proust expressed a preference for communion with the page-bound, rather than the living, playwright. At least, in book form:

We laugh at what Molière has to say only so far as we find it funny; when he bores us we are not afraid to look bored, and once we have definitely had enough of him we put him back in his place as abruptly as if he had neither genius nor celebrity

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How are we to respond to the level of insincerity apparently required in every friendship? How are we to respond to the two habitually conflicting projects carried on under the single umbrella of friendship: a project to secure affection, and a project to express ourselves honestly? It was because Proust was both unusually honest and unusually affectionate that he drove the joint project to breaking point and came up with his distinctive approach to friendship, which was to judge that the pursuit of affection and the pursuit of truth were fundamentally rather than occasionally incompatible. It meant adopting a much narrower conception of what friendship was for: it was for playful exchanges with Laure but not for telling Molière that he was boring and Anna de Noailles that she couldn’t write poetry. One might imagine that it made Proust a far lesser friend, but paradoxically, the radical separation had the power to make him both a better, more loyal, more charming friend, and a more honest, profound, and unsentimental thinker.