How Proust Can Change Your Life (Vintage International)

by Alain de Botton

Far from a memoir tracing the passage of a more lyrical age, it was a practical, universally applicable story about how to stop wasting time and start to appreciate life.

(in her memoirs, Proust’s maid Celeste helpfully informs those alarmed not to have made much ground in Proust’s novel that it is not designed to be read from one station to the next).

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

As Proust’s brother, Robert, put it, “The sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have broken a leg in order to have the opportunity to read In Search of Lost Time.”

“We do not choose as captain of a ship the most highly born of those aboard,” runs one aphorism, and we can admire the dry irony of this protest against inherited privilege, which must have been so galling in the unmeritocratic society of Pascal’s day.