How Proust Can Change Your Life

The fact that Proust did not at this point turn to translating George Eliot or annotating Dostoyevsky signals a recognition that the frustration he felt with Ruskin was not incidental to this author, but reflected a universally constraining dimension to reading and scholarship, and was sufficient reason never to strive for the title of Professor Proust.

It is one of the great and wonderful characteristics of good books (which allows us to see the role at once essential

yet limited that reading may play in our spiritual lives) that for the author they may be called “Conclusions” but for the reader “Incitements.” We feel very strongly that our own wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off, and we would like him to provide us with answers when all he is able to do is provide us with desires.… That is the value of reading, and also its inadequacy. To make it into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it

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However, Proust was singularly aware of how tempting it was to believe that reading could constitute our entire spiritual life, which led him to formulate some careful lines of instruction on a responsible approach to books:

As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. It becomes dangerous on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place, when the truth no longer appears to us as an ideal which we can realise only by the intimate progress of our own thought and the efforts of our heart, but as something material, deposited between the leaves of books like a honey fully prepared by others and which we need only take the trouble to reach down from the shelves of libraries and then sample passively in a perfect repose of mind and body

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Because books are so good at helping us to become aware of certain things we feel, Proust recognized the ease with which we could be tempted to leave the entire task of interpreting our lives to these objects.

He gave an example in his novel of the dangers of this excessive reliance, in a vignette about a man reading the works of La Bruyère. He pictured him coming across the following aphorism in the pages of Les Caractères:

Men often want to love, without managing to do so: they seek their own ruin without being able to attain it, and, if I can put it thus, they are forced against their will to remain free

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Because this suitor had tried unsuccessfully for years to make himself loved by a woman who would only have made him unhappy if she had loved him, Proust conjectured that the link between his own life and the aphorism would deeply move this unfortunate suitor. He would now read the passage over and over again, swelling it with meaning until it was ready to burst, appending to the aphorism a million words and the most stirring memories of his own life, repeating it with immense joy because it seemed so beautiful and so true.