How Proust Can Change Your Life

A few years before he died, Proust received a questionnaire asking him to list his eight favorite French paintings in the Louvre (into which he hadn’t stepped for fifteen years). His wavering answer: Watteau’s L’Embarquement or perhaps L’Indifférent; three paintings by Chardin: a self-portrait, a portrait of his wife, and Nature morte; Manet’s Olympia; a Renoir, or perhaps Corot’s La Barque du Dante, or maybe his La Cathédrale de Chartres; and finally, Millet’s Le Printemps.

So we have an idea of a good Proustian painting of spring, which he would presumably have judged to be as capable of evoking the actual qualities of spring as involuntary memory was of evoking the actual qualities of the past. But what does a good painter put into his canvases which an indifferent one leaves out, which is another way of asking what separates voluntary from involuntary memory? One answer is, not very much, or at least surprisingly little. It is remarkable to what extent bad paintings of spring resemble, though are still distinct from, good ones. Bad painters may be excellent draftsmen, good on clouds, clever on budding leaves, dutiful on roots, and yet still lack a command of those elusive elements in which the particular charms of spring are lodged. They cannot, for instance, depict, and hence make us notice, the pinkish border on the edge of the blossom of a tree, the contrast between storm and sunshine in the light across a field, the gnarled quality of bark or the vulnerable, tentative appearance of flowers on the side of a country track—small details no doubt, but in the end, the only things on which our sense of, and enthusiasm for, springtime can be based.

Similarly, what separates involuntary from voluntary memory is both infinitesimal and critical. Before he tasted the legendary tea and madeleine, the narrator was not devoid of memories of his childhood. It wasn’t as though he had forgotten where in France he went on holiday as a child (Combray or Clermont-Ferrand?), what the river was called (Vivonne or Varonne?), and with which relative he had stayed (Aunt Léonie or Lilie?). Yet these memories were lifeless because they lacked the equivalent of the touches of the good painter, the awareness of light falling across Combray’s central square in mid-afternoon, the smell of Aunt Léonie’s bedroom, the moistness of the air on the banks of the Vivonne, the sound of the garden bell, and the aroma of fresh asparagus for lunch—details that suggest it would be more accurate to describe the madeleine as provoking a moment of appreciation rather than mere recollection.

Why don’t we appreciate things more fully? The problem goes beyond inattention or laziness. It may also stem from insufficient exposure to images of beauty, which are close enough to our own world in order to guide and inspire us. The young man in Proust’s essay was dissatisfied because he only knew Veronese, Claude, and Van Dyck, who did not depict worlds akin to his own, and his knowledge of art history failed to include Chardin, whom he so badly needed to point out the interest of his kitchen. The omission seems representative. Whatever the efforts of certain great artists to open our eyes to our world, they cannot prevent us from being surrounded by numerous less helpful images that, with no sinister intentions and often with great artistry, nevertheless have the effect of suggesting to us that there is a depressing gap between our own life and the realm of beauty.

As a boy, Proust’s narrator develops a desire to go to the seaside. He imagines how beautiful it must be to go to Normandy, and in particular to a resort he has heard of called Balbec. However, he is under the thrall of some hazardously antiquated images of seaside life which appear to have come out of a book on the medieval Gothic period. He pictures a coastline shrouded in great banks of mist and fog, pounded by a furious sea; he pictures isolated churches that are as rugged and precipitous as cliffs, with their towers echoing to the sound of wailing seabirds and deafening wind. As for the locals, he imagines a Normandy inhabited by the descendants of the proud ancient mythical tribe of the Cimmerians, a people described by Homer as living in a mysterious land of perpetual darkness.

Such an image of seaside beauty explains the narrator’s travel difficulties, for when he gets to Balbec, he finds a typical early-twentieth-century beach resort. The place is full of restaurants, shops, motorcars, and cyclists; there are people going swimming and walking along the seafront with their parasols; there is a grand hotel, with a luxurious lobby, a lift, bellboys, and a huge dining room whose plate-glass window looks out onto a completely calm sea, bathed in glorious sunshine.