How Proust Can Change Your Life

A: Fully appreciated? Often, as little as quarter of an hour. As a boy, Proust’s narrator longs to befriend the beautiful, vivacious Gilberte, whom he has met playing in the Champs-Élysées. Eventually, his wish comes true. Gilberte becomes his friend, and invites him regularly to tea at her house. There she cuts him slices of cake, ministers to his needs, and treats him with great affection.

He is happy, but, soon enough, not as happy as he should be. For so long, the idea of having tea in Gilberte’s house was like a vague, chimerical dream, but after quarter of an hour in her drawing room, it is the time before he knew her, before she was cutting him cake and showering him with affection, that starts to grow chimerical and vague.

The outcome can only be a certain blindness to the favors he is enjoying. He will soon forget what there is to be grateful for because the memory of Gilberte-less life will fade, and with it, evidence of what there is to savor. The smile on Gilberte’s face, the luxury of her tea, and the warmth of her manners will eventually become such a familiar part of his life that there will be as much incentive to notice them as there is to notice omnipresent elements like trees, clouds, or telephones.

The reason for this neglect is that, like all of us in the Proustian conception, the narrator is a creature of habit, and therefore always liable to grow contemptuous of what is familiar.

We only really know what is new, what suddenly introduces to our sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, that for which habit has not yet substituted its pale fac-similes

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Q: Why does habit have such a dulling effect?

A: Proust’s most suggestive answer lies in a remark about the biblical Noah and his Ark:

When I was a small child, no character in the Bible seemed to me to have a worse fate than Noah, because of the flood which kept him locked up in the Ark for forty days. Later on, I was often ill, and also had to stay in an “Ark” for endless days. It was then I understood that Noah would never have been able to see the world as well as from the Ark, even though it was shuttered and it was night on earth

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How could Noah have seen anything of the planet when he was sitting in a shuttered Ark with an amphibious zoo? Though we usually assume that seeing an object requires us to have visual contact with it, and that seeing a mountain involves visiting the Alps and opening our eyes, this may only be the first, and in a sense the inferior, part of seeing, for appreciating an object properly may also require us to re-create it in our mind’s eye.

After looking at a mountain, if we shut our lids and dwell on the scene internally, we are led to seize on its important details. The mass of visual information is interpreted and the mountain’s salient features identified: its granite peaks, its glacial indentations, the mist hovering above the tree line—details that we would previously have seen but not for that matter noticed.

Though Noah was six hundred years old when God flooded the world, and would have had much time to look at his surroundings, the fact that they were always there, that they were so permanent in his visual field, would not have encouraged him to re-create them internally. What was the point of focusing closely on a bush in his mind’s eye when there was abundant physical evidence of bushes in the vicinity?

How different the situation would have been after two weeks in the Ark, when, nostalgic for his old surroundings and unable to see them, Noah would naturally have begun to focus on the memory of bushes, trees, and mountains, and therefore, for the first time in his six-hundred-year life, begun to see them properly.

Which suggests that having something physically present sets up far from ideal circumstances in which to notice it. Presence may in fact be the very element that encourages us to ignore or neglect it, because we feel we have done all the work simply in securing visual contact.

Q: Should we spend more time locked up in Arks then?