Zanna's Reviews > How Proust Can Change Your Life

With the gentlest possible mockery, de Botton makes a compelling case for celebrating and learning from an unlikely teacher: Marcel Proust. Here is some of his advice

Live passionately because we might die any time

Look for the familiar in art; be sensitised by it and improve your ability to notice and describe, and thus be at home everywhere; expand understanding of people's emotional depths

Learn from suffering, relish the insight it offers, use it to grow

Be honest about your feelings and attempt to describe them authentically, striving for an original language that reflects the multidimensional and unique nature of them. Thus enlarge you notion of normality and thus expand. Break with cliche, strive to experience the world authentically

Approach the news humanly, look beyond compression of stories. Take time and do justice

Insincerity to friends is to some extent necessary, because there is a gap between the negative thoughts we can endure having and those our friends can endure hearing

Say the unsayable in unsent letters... or novels!

Conversations should be selfless and interested in others; it is haphazard, fleeting and ultimately superficial, so our own selves are better explored in other media

Art helps us to find beauty; it sensitises us; this is why images close to our lives help us to appreciate the world anew.

In Shikasta Doris Lessing's extraterrestrial protagonist describes Proust as a great sociologist and anthropologist, which chimes with de Botton's view. The pressure is on me to actually read Proust, but I just can't bear it, I can't let go of my desperation for writing to go somewhere, with some pace, or at least mesmerise me with eloquence, like Woolf's 'The Waves'.