How Proust Can Change Your Life

Incapable though I am of obtaining anything for myself, of sparing myself the least ill, I have been endowed (and it’s certainly my only gift) with the power to procure, very often, the happiness of others, to relieve them from pain. I have reconciled not only enemies, but lovers, I’ve cured invalids while being capable only of worsening my own illness, I’ve made idlers work while remaining idle myself.… The qualities (I tell you this quite unaffectedly

because in other respects I have a very poor opinion of myself) which give me these chances of success on behalf of other people are, together with a certain diplomacy, a capacity for self-forgetfulness and an exclusive concentration on my friends’ welfare, qualities which are not often met with in the same person.… I felt while I was writing my book that if Swann had known me and had been able to make use of me, I should have known how to bring Odette round to him

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Q: Swann and Odette?

A: One shouldn’t necessarily equate the misfortunes of individual fictional characters with the author’s overall prognosis for human contentment. Trapped inside a novel, these unhappy characters would, after all, be the only ones unable to derive the therapeutic benefits of reading it.

Q: Did he think that love could last forever?

A: Well, no, but the limits to eternity didn’t lie specifically with love. They lay in the general difficulty of maintaining an appreciative relationship with anything or anyone that was always around.

Q: What kind of difficulties?

A: Take the unemotive example of the telephone. Bell invented it in 1876. By 1900, there were thirty thousand phones in France. Proust rapidly acquired one (tel. 29205) and particularly liked a service called the “theater-phone,” which allowed him to listen to live opera and theater in Paris venues.

He might have appreciated his phone, but he noted how quickly everyone else began taking theirs for granted. As early as 1907, he wrote that the machine was

a supernatural instrument before whose miracle we used to stand amazed, and which we now employ without giving it a thought, to summon our tailor or to order an ice cream

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Moreover, if the confiserie had a busy line or the connection to the tailor a hum, instead of admiring the technological advances that had frustrated our sophisticated desires, we tended to react with childish ingratitude.

Since we are children who play with divine forces without shuddering before their mystery, we only find the telephone “convenient,” or rather, as we are spoilt children, we find that “it isn’t convenient,” we fill Le Figaro with our complaints

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A mere thirty-one years separated Bell’s invention from Proust’s sad observations on the state of French telephone-appreciation. It had taken a little more than three decades for a technological marvel to cease attracting admiring glances and turn into a household object that we wouldn’t hesitate to condemn were we to suffer at its hands the minor inconvenience of a delayed glace au chocolat.

It points clearly enough to the problems faced by human beings, comparatively humdrum things, in seeking eternal, or at least life-long, appreciation from their fellows.

Q: How long can the average human expect to be appreciated?