How Proust Can Change Your Life

Except that none of this is glorious to the medieval Gothic narrator, who had been so looking forward to those precipitous cliffs, those wailing seabirds, and that howling wind.

The disappointment illustrates the critical importance of images in our appreciation of our surroundings, together with the risks of leaving home with the wrong ones. A picture of cliffs and seabirds wailing may be enchanting, but it will lead to problems when it is six hundred years out of line with the reality of our holiday destination.

Though the narrator experiences a particularly extreme gap between his surroundings and his internal conception of beauty, it is arguable that a degree of discrepancy is characteristic of modern life. Because of the speed of technological and architectural change, the world is liable to be full of scenes and objects that have not yet been transformed into appropriate images and may therefore make us nostalgic for another, now lost world, which is not inherently more beautiful but might seem so because it has already been widely depicted by those who open our eyes. There is a danger of developing a blanket distaste for modern life, which could have its attractions but lack the all-important images to help us identify them.

Fortunately for the narrator and his holiday, the painter Elstir has also come to Balbec, ready to create his own images rather than rely on those from old books. He has been at work painting local scenes, pictures of women in cotton dresses, of yachts out at sea, of harbors, seascapes, and a nearby racecourse. Furthermore, he invites the narrator to his studio. Standing in front of a painting of a racecourse, the narrator shyly admits that he’s never been tempted to go there, which isn’t surprising, given that beauty for him lies solely with stormy seas and wailing seabirds. However, Elstir suggests that he has been hasty and helps him to take a second look. He draws his attention to one of the jockeys, sitting in a paddock, gloomy and grey-faced in a bright jacket, reining in a rearing horse, and then points out how elegant women look at race meetings when they arrive in their carriages and stand up with their binoculars, bathed in a particular kind of sunlight, almost Dutch in tone, in which you can feel the coldness of the water.

The narrator has been avoiding not only the racecourse but also the seashore. He has been looking at the sea with his fingers in front of his eyes, in order to blot out any modern ships that might pass by and spoil his attempt to view the sea in an immemorial state, or at least as it must have looked no later than the early centuries of Greece. Again, Elstir rescues him from his peculiar habit and draws his attention to the beauty of yachts. He points out their uniform surfaces, which are simple, gleaming, and grey, and which in the bluish haze reflecting off the sea take on a lovely creamy softness. He talks of the women on board, who dress attractively in white cotton or linen clothes, which in the sunlight, against the blue of the sea, take on the dazzling whiteness of a spread sail.

After this encounter with Elstir and his canvases, the narrator has a chance to update his images of seaside beauty by a vital few centuries, and thereby saves his holiday.

I realised that regattas, and race-meetings where well-dressed women could be seen bathed in the greenish light of a marine race-course, could be as interesting for a modern artist as the festivities which Veronese or Carpaccio so loved to depict

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The incident emphasizes once more that beauty is something to be found, rather than passively encountered, that it requires us to pick up on certain details, to identify the whiteness of a cotton dress, the reflection of the sea on the hull of a yacht, or the contrast between the color of a jockey’s coat and his face. It also emphasizes how vulnerable we are to depression when the Elstirs of the world choose not to go on holiday and the pre-prepared images run out, when our knowledge of art does not stretch any later than Carpaccio (1450–1525) and Veronese (1528–1588), and we see a 200 horsepower Sunseeker accelerating out of the marina. It may genuinely be an unattractive example of aquatic transport; then again, our objection to the speedboat may stem from nothing other than a stubborn adherence to ancient images of beauty and a resistance to a process of active appreciation which even Veronese and Carpaccio would have undertaken had they been in our place.