Rereading HOW PROUST CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE by Alain de Botton: this book does that most disagreeable thing about books: it changes your life!
Book number: 79
I think it all began with books. Or at least it would have had to begun with books. I am talking about the rereading of this book, and about writing this moment, and about the other 228 books that I have read or reviewed, and seven that I have now reread. It was the infatuating nature of reading to my virgin mind and the strong passion for books that ensued, that must have started me on this journey that is now five years old. Although I’ve slipped away myself from the pretentiousness of being and thereby appearing to be a reader, and although books have given away their pretentiousness as well for appearing to be daunting, elevating, or egoistic, I nevertheless feel more deeply, genuinely, and core-heartedly attached and endowed to the books I’ve acquired, read, reviewed, and to the piles of them I am yet to read.
De Botton titles the last chapter of his book, which is a study of Proust the author, his philosophy about life, and the life he lived, ‘How to put books down’. In it, he, as intelligently as he’s written all the other eight chapters, shifts the attention of readers toward a very nuanced yet key aspect of what reading can do to a reader: that it can rob him, rather unconsciously and without an evil intent, from living a life of his own, that it can hinder him or her from conjuring his/her own thoughts, experiences, and philosophies. A book’s worth, despite its prestige and timeless wisdom, has nevertheless its limits, which it reaches once it helps you open your eyes and introduce you to robust way of living; from then on, as de Botton writes, ‘even the finest of books deserve to be thrown away’, for that’s where your individual journey begins which would require your own due experiences and your own due takes on them.
So where does this insight into reading and the limitations of books place me in my own reading journey and my own ‘literary idolatrous’ tendencies? Should I dare at the expense of sounding braggy, I would assess that the limitations of books, at least the books that I’ve read so far with their accumulated impact, have been reached, and I’ve been successfully, as successfully as it can be measured, sensitized both to my own inner world and the world that exist outside me. The books that I’ve not read yet, which far outnumbers the ones that I’ve read, have yet to reach their limits, for they are yet to sensitize me to myself and to the world in their own unique ways. But another that de Botton mentions in this last chapter, which could be of particular relatability to readers who also love to write, is this: ‘that good books can silence us.’
After my most recent emotionally traumatic event, which followed on many previous such events with equal emotional impact, that had been going as far back as I could push myself to gaze into the mist of past, I looked with intense desperateness for something that could equal my pain and therein play a whimsical effect of the rare kind of healing that only comes from literature. The only courage and interest I was allowed in those torturous days was only a few minutes of distractory reading on my phone, and there I returned to a slim book I had read a few years prior; for the reasons that it was slim and that I could enjoy reading it for a few minutes without walking away with any feeling of guilt, burden, or frustration that I hadn’t read enough, and that it had touched my heart when I first read it with its simplicity, fragmentated storytelling, brute and witty honesty, and of course for its impactful prose.
Even with a wounded and aching heart, and within a life so at-once heavy and heartless, Jenny Offill’s punching lines in her most beautiful and poignant book ‘Dept. of Speculation’, had a spell-binding effect on me, an effect that carried within the force to daringly unshackle me from the gravity of pain and buoy me to lightness, light, and awe. Lines like: ‘Are animals lonely? Other animals, I mean.’ Or, ‘and they asked me wouldn’t I get lonely in the countryside. Get?’ *Gasp. Even the fact that I was rereading these lines didn’t do anything at all to diminish its goose-bumpy and electrifying impact on me.
So yes, I am still guilty as charged when it comes to literary idolatry, and guilty also on the second count of ‘books having so huge an effect on me that it silences for to say something of my own.’ As Lord Henry from Oscar Wilde’s brilliant novel ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, aptly points out: ‘I am too fond of reading books to be able to write one.’ Yet the witticism of this remark, at least for me, points not to a disability to write, but a prudent admiration of the great books under whose shadow one’s own hesitance and fear toward picking up a pen might hide. And that’s where I stand when it comes to writing about what I have lived and what I have to say about life: hesitant and afraid.
But of course, this book doesn’t only have one chapter, particular the last one, and I also didn’t intent to write only about this chapter either; de Botton’s book fascinated and humored me the first time I read it, but I knew then as well as before rereading it, that I would only be understanding this book with a respectable degree of intellect only upon opening this book once again.
And I stand corrected: what this book has to offer is an intelligent, thorough, and deep study of one man’s life, his literary works, and his philosophy on life on one hand, and on the other hand it turns that study into even more intelligent, serviceable, illustrative, and both intellectually and emotionally moving insights on how all of Proust can help us live better in our own lives. So, it is humbly understandable, that no one, even someone with a background knowledge of who Proust is and how lengthy ‘In search of lost time’ actually is, or who Alain de Botton is and why he is called an everyday philosopher, can fully comprehend, appreciate, or learn from this book the first time – there’s just too much to impart.
A second read however, which offers the readers the benefits such as confidence, calmness, and preparedness, is a perfect way of diving deeper into a book, to understand it inside out, to look at it from different perspective, and to take away much more than the first encounter with the book had to offer.
‘How to live today’, the first chapter of this book, begins with a slight curiosity which comes about from a question posted in a magazine for celebrities about a possible dooms-day and what should one do with life in face of such an ultimate end, and closes with the wise insight that such an incident would only force to live more fully, of which we are capable right now as well. ‘How to read for yourself’ shows how reading can bridge lives lived with striking similarities from centuries apart, and that it can cure loneliness. ‘How to take your time’ unveils how every ordinary situation holds and extraordinary story in it; one just has to become more imaginative and patient. ‘How to suffer successfully’ presents a case so compelling that one would choose the pitiably sensitive and suffering life, like that of Proust, rather than its opposite. ‘How to express your emotions’ illustrates how to give our emotions words and why it is important; it also operates on why cliches don’t work.
‘How to be a good friend’ combines the contradiction between Proust extravagant friendliness and the compliments it won him and his distaste and pessimism for friendship in general: both has something valuable to teach, and something more valuable when combined. ‘How to open your eyes’ (one of my favorite chapters) opens your eyes to the abundance of life waiting around you rather than somewhere in the heavens. ‘How to be happy in love’ presents a few of timeless lessons for the romantic affairs, of which one is a praise for jealousy. ‘How to put books down’ tells us about the story of Proust and Woolf, where Woolf considers writing no more because Proust is too damn good and he has said it all.
The case now remains: whom to credit more? Proust or de Botton. Perhaps, they would’ve remained incomplete without each other; Proust in not being so precise, illustrative, or funny, and de Botton in not having a figure so aligned with this own philosophy and what he wants to do with it. De Botton, however, both here and in the videos of ‘The School of Life’, remains unhelpably elusive – not because he isn’t articulate enough, but because he’s so articulate that it becomes difficult for the reader to learn what he assumes he already knows by having just acquired the wisdom, which now seems lifelong.
(May 20, 2022_)