How How Proust Can Change Your Life Can Change Your Life

Connor and I went to New Orleans last week. As soon as we got to our hotel, we went out to a series of touristy bars, at which we drank away most of our money (Pat O'Brien's Hurricanes, Spring Break!), so we spent the rest of the time looking at cemeteries (often closed), eating ice for dinner, and going to bookstores in order to read the magazines there without buying them. The one that held my interest the longest was the current issue of Mental Floss, which has a book with the coils that you see on those big fat square batteries on the top of it, to herald a list: The 25 Most Powerful Books of the Past 25 Years. I had only read eight (weak), but all of them seemed like reasonable choices. The ones I didn't read seemed, from their blurbs, reasonable as well, and there were no books that I could think of that seemed more Powerful from the last 25 years, although I think part of that is I feel like I am not really qualified to gauge what is and is not powerful about books, since I cried at the end of Pnin and clearly overvalue the power of books in the first place. Anyway, number 17 was How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton, and I am choosing it as the newest book club selection, because hey, you should all have your lives changed by Proust as well.

You all know Proust, yes? He is the fellow who tasted madeleines, dipped in tea, and remembered his life for the next three thousand pages or so. Proust can change your life, I think, insofar as someone who like me has only got to know him in translation can vouch. C.S. Lewis, in a quote that I once floated as an epigram for Our Beloved Blog, said that "We read, to know that we are not alone." This is a quote that I have a number of problems with, as I've mentioned; one of the things I said was that maybe essays, much more than fiction, could remind you that you're not alone. My favorite thing about Proust, which shows up in the de Botton book and which I am gleaning (halfway through Within a Budding Grove) in reading it myself, is that he has torqued his novel into something like an endless essay; it's like those little, once-every-ten-paragraphs generalizing mini-essays that George Eliot gave us have taken over the entire show. Proust loves to tell you not what people are like, but what sort of people people are like. "Swann was one of those men," he tells us, "who, having lived for a long time among the illusions of love have seen the blessings they have brought to innumerable women increase the happiness of those women without exciting in them any gratitude, any tenderness toward their benefactors; but who believe that in their children they can feel an affection which, being incarnate in their own name, will allow them to survive after their death." Reading along, one might not think a lot of it. "Of course, one of those men." But really? Do you know anyone who does that? I don't, and I certainly wouldn't, if I met one, call him "one of those men". But the fantasy that Proust offers is one of infinite generalizability: if there is a person out there, he or she is one of those persons, and if there is a church that young Marcel visits, it is one of those churches. I find this inordinately appealing, maybe even...life changing?

In the Mental Floss blurb, they call How Proust Can Change Your Life "The Book that Helped People to Stop Helping Themselves", and they have de Botton saying, "What annoys me about most self-help books is that they have no tragic sense...I find a certain kind of pessimism consoling and helpful. Part of fulfillment might be recognizing how awful life is." Sounds good. So, check out the book; check out the actual Proust book if you also care to (I plan on finishing Within a Budding Grove and starting the Guermantes Way tomorrow while I'm supposed to be doing chores).