On Reading (On Series)

by Marcel Proust

There are perhaps no days of our childhood that we lived as fully as the days we think we left behind without living at all: the days we spent with a favourite book.

She was an excellent judge of novels and poems, but on such topics she always relied, with a feminine humility, on the opinions of more competent authorities. There, in such wavering realms of caprice, she thought, a single individual’s taste was in no position to ascertain the truth. But when it came to the things whose rules and principles her mother had taught her - how certain dishes should be prepared, how Beethoven’s sonatas should be played, how a guest should be made to feel welcome - she knew she possessed the correct idea of perfection and could discern the greater or lesser extent to which others approached it.

a sort of simplicity of means, sobriety, and charm.

As for me, I feel myself live and think only in rooms where everything is the creation, the language, of lives profoundly different from my own, of a taste opposed to mine, where I can find nothing of my own conscious thoughts, where my imagination is excited by feeling itself driven into the heart of the not-me;

Then, risking both punishment if I was discovered and the insomnia that, once I had finished the book, might last all night, I re-lit my candle after my parents went to bed;

And now what? Is that all there was to the book? These beings to whom we had given more of our attention and affection than we give to the people in our life, not always daring to admit the extent to which we loved them, so that we even feigned boredom or closed the book with pretended indifference when our parents came upon us while we were reading and seemed to smile at our emotion; these people for whom we had panted and sobbed - we would never see them again, never learn anything more about them.

Having spent two volumes letting us glimpse the delightful possibilities of a certain marriage, having frightened us and then delighted us with every obstacle encountered and then overcome, the author let us learn from a passing comment by a secondary character that the marriage had taken place, we don’t know exactly when or how - this astonishing epilogue seemed to have been written from the heights of heaven by someone who cared nothing for our transient passions, someone substituted somehow for our author. How we wanted the book to keep going, and, if that were not possible, wanted more information about all of its characters, wanted to learn something further about their lives, and spend our own on matters not altogether foreign to the love that they inspired within us,4 whose object we had suddenly lost; how we wanted not to have loved in vain, for an hour, those beings who tomorrow will be nothing but names on a forgotten page, in a book that has nothing to do with life, and whose value we had seriously mistaken, since its fate here below, we now understand (and our parents inform us, if necessary, with a contemptuous word), was not in the least to contain the whole of the world and all of destiny, as we had thought, but simply to occupy a very narrow place on a notary’s bookshelf, between the undistinguished annals of the Illustrated Magazine of Fashion and the Geography of the Eure-et-Loir Region…

that what our childhood reading leaves behind in us is above all the image of the places and days where and when we engaged in it. I have not escaped its sorcery: intending to speak about reading I have spoken of everything but books, because it is not of books that the reading itself has spoken to me.

reading, unlike conversation, consists for each of us in receiving the communication of another thought while remaining alone, or in other words, while continuing to bring into play the mental powers we have in solitude and which conversation immediately puts to flight; while remaining open to inspiration, the soul still hard at its fruitful labours upon itself.

‘Laughter is not at all cruel by nature; it distinguishes man from beast, and it is, as stands written in the Odyssey of the Grecian Poet Homerus, the privilege of the blessed, immortal deities who laugh Olympian peals to while away all the hours of eternity.’

We can feel that our wisdom begins where the author’s ends, and we want him to give us answers when all he can do is give us desires.

This mist that our eager eyes want to pierce: that is the last word of the painter’s art. And the supreme efforts of the writer, like those of the painter, culminate in raising, only part way, the veil of ugliness and meaninglessness which makes us incurious about the universe.

Reading is at the threshold of our inner life; it can lead us into that life but cannot constitute it.

What is needed, therefore, is an intervention that occurs deep within ourselves while coming from someone else, the impulse of another mind that we receive in the bosom of solitude. As we have seen, this is precisely the definition of reading and fits nothing but reading.

Emerson rarely began to write without re-reading several pages of Plato; Dante is not the only poet whom Virgil has brought to the threshold of paradise.

Insofar as reading initiates us, insofar as her magic key opens the door deep inside us to the dwelling places we would not otherwise have known how to reach, its role in our life is a salutary one.

It is not the same for a literary man. He reads for the sake of reading, to store up what he has read.

His spirit lacks all original activity and does not know how to isolate in books the substance which could make it stronger; he weighs himself down with the book as a whole, which instead of being something he can assimilate, a life principle, is for him a foreign body, a death principle.

So too, the greatest writers, in the hours when they are not in direct communication with their thoughts, enjoy the company of books. Besides, is it not for them above all that the books were written? Do the books not reveal to them a thousand beauties which remain hidden from the masses?

Victor Hugo knew Quintus-Curtius, Tacitus, and Justinian by heart, and that if anyone challenged him on the validity of a term he could trace its genealogy all the way back to its origins, citing quotations which demonstrated a true erudition.11 (I have shown elsewhere how this erudition could nourish his genius instead of stifling it, the way a bundle of sticks can put out a small fire but feed a large one.) Maeterlinck, who for me is the opposite of a ‘literary man’ in this sense, whose spirit is constantly open to the thousand nameless emotions communicated by the beehive, the soil, or the grass, greatly reassures us about the dangers of erudition, of bibliophilia almost, when he describes for us as an amateur the engravings which adorn an old edition of Jacob Cats or Antonius Sanderus.

Schopenhauer never offers an opinion without immediately supporting it with multiple quotations, but we can feel that for him the texts he cites are only examples, unconscious anticipatory allusions in which he is happy to recognise certain aspects of his own thought but which in no way inspired it.

There is no doubt that friendship, friendship for individuals, is a frivolous thing, and reading is a friendship. But at least it is a sincere form of friendship, and the fact that it is directed at someone dead, someone absent, gives it something disinterested, almost touching.

In their taste for and enjoyment of reading, great writers are very quickly drawn to the classic books. Even those who seemed most ‘romantic’ to their contemporaries read hardly anything but the ‘classics’.

A tragedy by Racine, a volume of Saint-Simon’s memoirs, is like those beautiful things which are made no longer. The language in which they were cast by the great artists, with a freedom that makes their sweetness shine and their native force stand out, moves us like the sight of certain kinds of marble, no longer in use today but used often by the workmen of the past. There is no question that the stone in these old buildings has faithfully preserved the sculptor’s thought, but the sculptor has also preserved for us the stone of a type unknown today, clothed it in all the colours he knew how to draw from it, bring out, and harmonise. It is likewise the living syntax of seventeenth-century France - and in it vanished customs and turns of thought - that we love to find in Racine’s poetry. The forms themselves of this syntax, laid bare, honoured, embellished by a chisel as sturdy as it is delicate, are what move us in his turns of phrase, colloquial to the point of strangeness and daring,19 whose abrupt pattern we see, in the sweetest and most touching passages, flash by like an arrow or turn back in beautiful broken lines.