How Proust Can Change Your Life

So, Chris, I read Plato, Not Prozac! and came to a slightly different verdict than yours. I, too, found it tedious to read through the cases he presented, but only when they were not relevant to my own life. I do wish he would have presented some sort of method by which a person might face her own problems, but as you mention, the method he offers is to talk to him or one of his colleagues, since they are obviously so much more qualified and well read.

Bullshit.

You and I have read more than most people in the world. As I always say, I think I and many of my friends are unquestionably smarter than 99% of the world (and before being falsely humble or appalled by my arrogance, consider that 1% of the world still amounts to 65 million people). All Marinoff does is pay attention to the lessons learned in what he reads. He has read and understood the work of philosophers around the world, just as you and I have read and (at least sometimes) understood countless works by philosophers, novelists, filmmakers, songwriters, and friends.

The importance of Marinoff's book (and his profession) is the recognition that the things you learn are tools for living; even if you feel you have found a philosophy or viewpoint that you feel is true, when it stops working for you or when you have come to an apparent impasse in your life, you must consider other possibilities. Not as a replacement for your own philosophy, but as an aspect of your philosophy you need to emphasize in order to make sense of things and solve your problems. Sure, there are some truly contradictory philosophies (idealism vs. materialism, theism vs. atheism), but when it comes to living, nearly every philosophy has something helpful to say (and nearly all of them say the same things in different ways). Marinoff urged me to consider more carefully those ideas which for whatever reason (their label, my ignorance of them, their followers) I have moved on from.

Marinoff's value lies in the fact that he has read widely of useful things and remembers what he's read. More helpfully, perhaps he could cross-reference his philosophers with problems and ways of looking at things in order to either remind people of things they've forgotten or open their minds to viewpoints they've never considered.

Which brings me to a book that has been an important, practical lesson (reminder?) for me. Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life examines the author and his work, basically answering the question, How on earth could those one-and-a-quarter-million words be worth the read? Using a little of Proust's life and work paired with his own philosophies on life and love, de Botton's take on the importance of art might be the best I've read.

Do you really miss out by not reading In Search of Lost Time or any other book? De Botton first proposes a very practical value of literature and art: improving our relationships. By reading a good book, you recognize in the characters those in your circle of acquaintance and by doing so realize that you are not alone, no matter where you are. Through an author's eyes, you can attend to details you might never have noticed had you not read a 100-page description of someone's troubled sleep habits. By more fully understanding people and being able to recognize characters from a novel in the world around you, you will also not feel so out of place in foreign situations or places. Reading widens your circle of acquaintance and opens your eyes to the plight of those around you, and the unread person limits herself to knowing in a very limited way only those people and things in her immediate vicinity (an unfulfilling, usually prejudiced and unenlightened, state).

Proust wrote his novel about the people and places he knew intimately and showed his readers aspects of them that hold an endless power to fascinate. Proust talks of a particular artist who painted tablescapes and ordinary people and settings, noting that he takes what is overly familiar and makes it beautiful merely by drawing attention to its existence. If we fail to see the beauty in the things around us, we fail to take the lesson of art: it is not the particular things being written about, painted, sung, but the way of seeing things that the artist wishes us to delight in. If we visit Notre Dame in Paris because we read Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), we are missing the point entirely. By paying attention to how an author tells a story, we can use the insight to see our own worlds more clearly.

If, instead, we cease thinking (or writing or creating in some way) after we read, we put too much importance in the book itself rather than its point of view. A work of art allows us to recognize in our own worlds those things worth painting, singing, writing.

De Botton also offers very practical advice from Proust, but for me he sparked a realization that I can't let authors paralyze me. He noted that Virginia Woolf was incredibly depressed when she read Proust, since how could anything be written after that? Eventually she was able to write Mrs. Dalloway. Proust could have his sphere and she her own, however insignificant it might seem in comparison. Proust, Faulkner, Dickens, Jonathan Safran Foer, Scarlett Thomas, none of them have lived my life. I do have a unique perspective and I do have something worth saying; I just need to find out what that is. In the meantime, I will try to be more attentive to what authors and artists are trying to show me, after being reminded that they are not writing travel guides and self-help books, they are writing their own particular way of seeing.