“To make reading into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can only introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.” – Marcel Proust The modern world is the age of information. We’re subject to a barrage of noise that’s often hard to interpret, prioritise and remember much of what we’re exposed to day-to-day. In my case, and with no intention I’ll often forget an important lesson that I had wished to apply everyday. With this in mind; I’ve decided to summarise and splurge personally profound passages at the conclusion of each book I’m reading with the intention to check back, absorb and activate it’s effect. I also hope this serves as some form of encouragement for those reading to reach out and take on the literature I’ve most thoroughly enjoyed. How Proust Can Change Your Life – Alain De Botton 1997 “Proust was an invaluable authority on how to live a richer, happier and more successful life. Although Proust was rarely happy himself, this study shows the benefits he can bring to our lives.” 1. How to love life today “I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, love affairs, studies it – our life – hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly. But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! If only the visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X., making a trip to India. The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of a normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to thank that we are humans, and that death may come this evening” – Pg 5 In Search Of Lost Time had the advantage of pointing out directly enough to a central theme of the novel: a search for the causes behind the dissipation and loss of time. Far from a memoir tracing all the passage of a more lyrical age, it was a practical, universally applicable story about how to stop wasting, and begin appreciating one’s life. – Pg 8 2. How to be a good friend Perhaps the best indication of Proust’s views on how we should read lies in his approach to looking at paintings. After his death his friend Lucien Daudet wrote an account of his time with him, which included a description of a visit they once made together to the Louvre. Whenever looking at paintings, Proust had a habit of trying to match the figures depicted on canvases he knew with people from his own life. – Pg 19 The possibility of making such a visual connection between people circulating in apparently wholly different worlds explains Proust’s assertion that ‘aesthetically, the number of humans is so restricted that we must constantly, wherever we may be, have the pleasure of seeing people we know.’ – Pg 22 How helpful for Proust to remark that, ‘One cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine of the traits of the one we love.’ – Pg 24 In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable the reader to discern what, without this book, he would have perhaps never experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of it’s veracity. – Pg 25 One answer is because it is the only way in which art can properly affect rather than simply distract us from life. – Pg 25 3. How to read for yourself “He read newspapers with great care. He wouldn’t even overlook the news-in-brief section. A new-in-brief told by him turned into a whole tragic or comic novel, thanks to his imagination and to his fantasy” – Pg 38 By such efforts, a story that had seemed to deserve no more than a gruesome few lines in a news-in-brief had been integrated into the history of a tragedy and mother-son relationships, it’s dynamics observed with the complex sympathy one would usually accord to Oedipus on stage, but consider inappropriate, even shocking, when lavished on a murderer from the morning paper. – Pg 42 It shows how vulnerable much of a 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 of breakfast in the form of news-in-brief. – Pg 42 4. How to suffer successfully A good way of evaluating the wisdom of someone’s ideas might be to undertake a careful examination of the state of their own mind and health. – Pg 54 Though we can of coarse use our minds without being in pain, Proust’s suggestion is that we become properly inquisitive only when distressed. We suffer, therefor we think, and we do so because thinking helps us to place pain into context, it helps us to understand it’s origins, plot its dimensions and reconcile ourselves to it’s presence. It follows that ideas which have arisen without pain lack an important source of motivation. For Proust, mental activity seems divided into two categories; there are what might be called painless thought, sparked by no particular discomfort, inspired by nothing other than a disinterested wish to find out how sleep works or why human beings forget; and painful thoughts, arising out of a distressing inability to sleep or recall or name – and … Continue reading How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain De Botton