iiiii.jpg I have finished this book called “How Proust Can Change Your Life” by Alain de Botton. I would link to it, but I don’t think you want to buy it (borrow it if you are interested) but it is not worth purchasing. It is portrayed as a self help, tongue in cheek, biography of Proust and kind of the experience of reading In Search of Lost Time. It just doesn’t work. Proust was interesting, but is definitely not a candidate to show other people how to live (at least from his personal life). However, if looking at advice from the source of his novel…well, I don’t know. It just doesn’t work for me. Maybe I am missing the whole point. Maybe it was supposed to be tongue in cheek from the outset. I did manage to find some quotations for you…

“One way of considering In Search of Lost Time is as an unusually long unsent letter, the antidote to a lifetime of proustification, the flip side of the Athenas, lavish gifts, and long-stemmed chrysanthemums, the place where the unsayable was finally granted expression.”

And Proust’s “instruction on a responsible approach to books.”

“As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. It becomes dangerous on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place, when the truth no longer appears to us as an ideal which we can realise only by the intimate progress of our own thought and the efforts of our heart, but as something material, deposited between the leaves of books like a honey fully prepared by others and which we need only take the trouble to reach down from the shelves of libraries and then sample passively in a perfect repose of mind and body.”

Proust was a weirdo. It was interesting ancedote about his meeting with Joyce. I hope to one day find a better biography. That is all.