Book Review: How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain De Botton

I am a long-time admirer of the writer, literary critic, and philosopher Alain De Botton. If you’ve spent a considerable amount of time on the psychology/philosophy/mental health side of Youtube, you’ve no doubt come across videos from one of his enterprises, The School of Life. Without turning this into a biography (far too lazy to write one- this is in deep contrast to Botton, who exhibited no laziness whatsoever in his detailed literary criticism and biographical account of Marcel Proust’s life and work in How Proust Can Change Your Life), Botton has spun a very enviable career as an author, entrepreneur, and speaker out of an MPhil in Philosophy. I am a huge admirer of anyone who has managed to spin fabulous careers out of degrees that are typically regarded as utterly useless in today’s world (I need ideas!).

That said, I so enjoyed this book and now have a renewed interest in reading everything De Botton has authored as well as a newfound interest in Marcel Proust. At this point though, I should probably tell you who Marcel Proust was because if you’re like me before I started reading this book, you may have heard the name but don’t have much of an idea. Proust was an early 1900s bourgeoise French novelist and literary critic who apparently never held a real job but spent his time writing books, being tucked up in bed with an almost perpetual cold, and socializing with aristocracy at fabulous Parisian parties. He authored a massive tome of a novel that spans seven volumes and over 1 million words called In Search of Lost Time- a profound work of French fiction about the search for truth and appreciation in one’s life.

If you are intimidated by reading 1 million words of French philosophy/fiction about man’s search for truth and meaning (I know I am), De Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life could not be a more welcoming and gentle introduction to not only the mind and life of Proust, but the literary landscape of 1900s Europe. The ingenious Botton organized Proust’s sprawling expanse of literary criticism, personal letters to friends, and of course the mammoth of a novel In Search of Lost into a tongue-in-cheek self-help book format detailing Proust’s approach to Love, Friendship, Suffering, Artisty, Reading and more. De Botton, like Proust, has the rare ability to imbue otherwise (in much less talented hands) trite observations with unique insight, humor, and liveliness.

Here’s a short collection of my favorite Proustian insights as distilled by De Botton:

On Expression:
In the chapter on expression De Botton details the root of Prout’s annoyance with the use of cliches in writing and speech. De Botton writes:

Clichés are detrimental in so far as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface. And if this matters, it is because the way we speak is ultimately linked to the way we feel, because how we describe the world must at some level reflect how we first experience it.

On Friendship:
Although being somewhat of a socialite with many friends (after his passing at age 51, many of Proust’s friends published books detailing their time with him and praising his capacity as a friend), Proust had a surprising, uniquely pessimistic but also insightful view of friendship. Proust writes:

‘Conversation, which is friendship’s mode of expression, is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute.’

In this chapter, De Botton extracts that Proust’s view of friendship is not that it has no value but that it simply fails to deliver on its promise as an avenue to be known, seen, and express our true selves. You can hardly be expected to bring forth the deepest and truest expression of yourself in typical conservation with friends. Conversations between friends are inevitably filled with pauses, interruptions, and large expanses of time when you have nothing of import to say, and in the instances where you do in fact muster some expression of your deepest self, it rarely comes out clearly, articulately or with total completeness. Added to that- a very healthy obfuscation of truth is necessary to maintain good relations with others; for example, it’s rarely a good idea to lay bare all your criticisms of your dear friend’s life and decisions even though it would reveal some of your deeply held truths. Also, you would do well to disguise your boredom at a birthday party or disinterest in a good friend’s poetry. Yet, despite the limitations of conversation for expression, Proust always found value in communing with friends, entertaining them, and showing expressions of care.

Not only did this view make sense to me but it alleviated some of my own distress. I sometimes feel that I am inadequate at making an appropriate social performance of my truest self. I have heard it said of myself more than once that people are often quite surprised by a turn of phrase I would use or way of being I would randomly express- never being quite sure which version of me would come forth at any point in time. I envy people who have mastered their social mask to the point where they create the illusion of having a consistent and reliable way of being in the world. In the Proustian view, only in writing a novel or some other artistry could there ever be hope that one finds a distilled expression of self and their deepest truth. This view helps ease the anxieties that we may have about conjuring and bringing forth every aspect of our deepest nature in daily interaction.

On Seeing

As Botton recounts- in Proustian philosophy, much of human discontent is merely an inability to see correctly and it is the occupation of artists to remind us of the sublime in mundane objects. Artists may guide us towards seeing everyday items such as kitchen utensils and common fruit as possessing much-overlooked beauty and glory. According to Proust, if we could only see rightly, the way artists see, much of our discontent and longing for luxury and royal refinement would be alleviated. He wrote to a magazine publisher:

I have just written a little study in the philosophy of art, if I may use that slightly pretentious phrase, in which I have tried to show how the great painters initiate us into a knowledge and love of the external world, how they are the ones ‘by whom our eyes are opened’, opened, that is, on the world. In this study, I use the work of Chardin as an example, and I try to show its influence on our life, the charm and wisdom with which it coats our most modest moments by initiating us into the life of still life. Do you think this sort of study would interest the readers of the Revue Hebdomadaire?

The essay was ultimately rejected but De Botton extrapolates that:

The readers of the Revue Hebdomadaire would have benefited from a chance to reappraise their conceptions of beauty, and could have entered into a new and possibly more rewarding relationship with salt cellars, crockery and apples.Great painters possess such power to open our eyes be- cause of the unusual receptivity of their own eyes to aspects of visual experience; to the play of light on the end of a spoon, the fibrous softness of a tablecloth, the velvety skin of a peach or the pinkish tones of an old man’s skin. We might caricature the history of art as a succession of geniuses engaged in pointing out different elements wor- thy of our attention, a succession of painters using their immense technical mastery to say what amounts to, ‘Aren’t those back streets in Delft pretty?’ or, ‘Isn’t the Seine nice outside Paris?’

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De Botton's short book How Proust Can Change Your Life is truly a treasure trove and an easy access point into the literary forms of Proust for the casual reader which may otherwise seem very remote and the domain of cerebral academic forums. By presenting the philosophies, fiction, life history, and personal letters of Proust in short topical chapters, De Botton does us a great service.

Rating: ★★★★★