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‘When two people part it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.’
It shows how vulnerable much of human experience is to abbreviation, how easily it can be stripped of the more obvious signposts by which we guide ourselves when ascribing importance. Much literature and drama would conceivably have proved entirely unengaging, would have said nothing to us had we first encountered its subject matter over breakfast in the form of news-in-brief.
Hence Proust’s assertion that the greatness of works of art has nothing to do with the apparent quality of their subject matter, and everything to do with the subsequent treatment of that matter. And hence his associated claims that everything is potentially a fertile subject for art and that we can make discoveries as valuable in an advertisement for soap as in Pascal’s Pensées.
It might be a Proustian slogan: n’allez pas trop vite.
We suffer, therefore we think, and we do so because thinking helps us to place pain in context, it helps us to understand its origins, plot its dimensions and reconcile ourselves to its presence.
‘Happiness is good for the body,’ Proust tells us, ‘but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind.’
These griefs put us through a form of mental gymnastics which we would have avoided in happier times. Indeed, if a genuine priority is the development of our mental capacities, the implication is that we would be better off being unhappy than content, better off pursuing tormented love affairs than reading Plato or Spinoza.
Perhaps the greatest claim one can therefore make for suffering is that it opens up possibilities for intelligent, imaginative enquiry – possibilities which may quite easily be, and most often are, overlooked or refused.
is one of the powers of jealousy to reveal to us the extent to which the reality of external facts and the emotions of the heart are an unknown element which lends itself to endless suppositions. We imagine that we know exactly what things are and people think, for the simple reason that we do not care about them. But as soon as we have a desire to know, as the jealous man has, then it becomes a kaleidoscope in which we can no longer distinguish anything.
To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behaviour of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding, even if, as Proust warns us, ‘when we discover the true lives of other people, the real world beneath the world of appearance, we get as many surprises as on visiting a house of plain exterior which inside is full of hidden treasures, torture-chambers or skeletons’.
The moral? To recognize that our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes and emotional betrayals, and to avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time and the weather.
We may ask why Proust objected to phrases that had been used too often. After all, doesn’t the moon shine discreetly? Don’t sunsets look as if they were on fire? Aren’t clichés just good ideas that have proved rightly popular? The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones.
Clichés are detrimental in so far as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface. And if this matters, it is because the way we speak is ultimately linked to the way we feel, because how we describe the world must at some level reflect how we first experience it.
munificent ‘In restaurants, and everywhere where there was a chance, Marcel would give enormous tips.
The happiness which may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust’s therapeutic conception, it reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
A few years before he died, Proust received a questionnaire asking him to list his eight favourite French paintings in the Louvre [into which he hadn’t stepped for fifteen years]. His wavering answer: Watteau’s L’Embarquement or perhaps L’Indifferent; three paintings by Chardin, a self-portrait, a portrait of his wife, and Nature Morte; Manet’s Olympia; a Renoir, or perhaps Corot’s La Barque du Dante, or maybe his La Cathédrale de Chartres; and finally, Millet’s Le Printemps.
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 colour 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
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That we shouldn’t deny the bread on the sideboard a place in our conception of beauty, that we should shoot the painter rather than the spring, and blame memory rather than what is remembered; that we should restrain our expectations when introduced to a Comte de Salignac-Fénelon-de-Clermont-Tonnerre, and avoid fixating on spelling mistakes and alternative histories of Imperial France when meeting those less elaborately titled.
If prostitutes . . . attract us so little, it is not because they are less beautiful than other women, but because they are ready and waiting; because they already offer us precisely what we seek to attain.
Afraid of losing her, we forget all the others. Sure of keeping her, we compare her with those others whom at once we prefer to her.
The path from depression and self-loathing to cheerful defiance suggests a gradual recognition that one person’s achievements did not have to invalidate another’s, that there would always be something left to do even if it momentarily appeared otherwise.
It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.
