How Proust Can Change Your Life

The fact that we might be surprised to recognize someone we know in a portrait painted four centuries ago suggests how hard it is to hold on to anything more than a theoretical belief in a universal human nature. As Proust saw the problem:

People of bygone ages seem infinitely remote from us. We do not feel justified in ascribing to them any underlying

intentions beyond those they formally express; we are amazed when we come across an emotion more or less like what we feel today in a Homeric hero.… [I]t is as though we imagined the epic poet … to be as remote from ourselves as an animal seen in a zoo

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It is perhaps only normal if our initial impulse on being introduced to the characters of The Odyssey is to stare at them as though they were a family of duck-billed platypuses circling their enclosure in the municipal zoo. Bewilderment might be no less intense at the thought of listening to a louche character with a thick mustache, standing in the midst of antiquated-looking figures:

But an advantage of more prolonged encounters with Proust or Homer is that worlds that had seemed threateningly alien reveal themselves to be essentially much like our own, expanding the range of places in which we feel at home. It means we can open the zoo gates and release a set of trapped creatures from the Trojan War or the Faubourg Saint-Germain, whom we had previously considered with unwarranted provincial suspicion because they had names like Eurycleia and Telemachus or had never sent a fax.

(II) A CURE FOR LONELINESS

We might also let ourselves out of the zoo. What is considered normal for a person to feel in any place at any point is liable to be an abbreviated version of what is in fact normal, so that the experiences of fictional characters afford us a hugely expanded picture of human behavior, and thereby a confirmation of the essential normality of thoughts or feelings unmentioned in our immediate environment. After we have childishly picked a fight with a lover who had looked distracted throughout dinner, there is relief in hearing Proust’s narrator admit to us that “as soon as I found Albertine not being nice to me, instead of telling her I was sad, I became nasty,” and revealing that “I never expressed a desire to break up with her except when I was unable to do without her,” after which our own romantic antics might seem less like those of a perverse platypus.

Similarly, MLPs can make us feel less lonely. After we have been abandoned by a lover who has expressed in the kindest way imaginable a need to spend a little more time on her own, how consoling to lie in bed and witness Proust’s narrator crystallizing the following thought:

When two people part it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches

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How comforting to witness a fictional person (who is also, miraculously, ourselves as we read) suffering the same agonies of a saccharine dismissal and, importantly, surviving.

(III) THE FINGER-PLACING ABILITY

The value of a novel is not limited to its depiction of emotions and people akin to those in our own life; it stretches to an ability to describe these far better than we would have been able, to put a finger on perceptions that we recognize as our own, but could not have formulated on our own.

We might have known someone like the fictional Duchesse de Guermantes and felt there was something superior and insolent in her manner, without knowing quite what, until Proust discreetly pointed out in parentheses how the Duchesse reacted when, during a smart dinner, a Madame de Gallardon made the error of being a little overfamiliar with the Duchesse, known also as Oriane des Laumes, and addressed her by her first name:

“Oriane” (at once Mme des Laumes looked with amused astonishment towards an invisible third person, whom she seemed to call to witness that she had never authorised Mme de Gallardon to use her Christian name) …