How Proust Can Change Your Life
by Alain de Botton

Dear Reader, will you do me a favour?

Please toss a bucket down into the well of childhood nostalgia, and see if you can haul up the following image for me: a child of about eight or nine, at any rate a couple of years older than you are, is squinting down at you, fingers spaced about an inch apart. He or she (She. It was that Debbie chick, the one with the t-shirt that said "Here Comes Trouble" on it, so that we called her "Trouble" for months, even after we found out her real name, and we were right) says to you, brandishing those stubby, gnawed-down fingers in your face, "Are you afraid of a man this big?" And you, plucky little you, already terrified, since you know more or less what is coming, but even more terrified of seeming terrified, say, defiantly, "No." At which point, the bigger child tries to poke the fingers into your eyes, and as you shy away shrieking, clocks you one and booms triumphantly, "Why'd you flinch, then?"

Children are cruel little suckers, instinctively exploring dominance and subjugation the way baby birds explore flight. Right? They are us stripped bare, without our slowly-spun coccoons of good manners and guilt. But I digress.

My point is that these days I am, myself, a man this big. If you look for me amidst the hieroglyphs on the wall of the Egyptian tomb, I will be the tiny, ant-like, impotent figure scurrying around beneath the feet of the Pharaoh. Life is up there, flaming away atop Mount Everest, while I am down in the basement, curled up like a foetus, thumb firmly in mouth, sleeping twelve hours a day and reading and reading and never writing.

Oh, poor Wendy, you say. Poor, poor baby. Why, something terrible must have befallen you to make you only this big. What can it possibly be, and is there any way I can help?

Well, I appreciate your concern, dear reader, really I do, but I'm afraid there is very little you can do but sit down with me and sigh heavily and contemplate the ruins of my life. Oh, don't go clicking off to openletters.net, the review's coming, it's coming. Just sit.

So. In a nutshell. I'm a woman of a certain age, though not necessarily the one you're thinking, childless, careerless, ambitionless, and I would say directionless if I weren't so patently downwardly mobile. I can't, and I do mean can't, understand Foucault, can only smile blankly and nod when I hear the word Rachmaninoff, and the mere suggestion of a game of mental chess sends me into howls of impotent despair. Which is not to say that I 'get' popular culture either. I'm one of those people who sort of remembers the Violent Femmes, but without the benefit of a permanent government job to sink slowly into throughout my declining years. I belong to one of the most privileged demographic groups in one of the most privileged societies in the world, and I have failed, failed utterly, to take advantage of my privilege. There, you see? Let us now sit in stunned silence as the horror of it all sinks in and settles like a black, oily residue in the deep subaqueous cracks and crevasses of our minds. There.

But you poor thing, you say. Why, all you have to do, really, is read "How Proust Can Change Your Life", by Alain de Botton. That will make you feel better.

Why, thank you, Reader. As a matter of fact, I have read "How Proust Can Change Your Life", by Alain de Botton, but I had forgotten all about it. You're right, though. Possibly just thinking about it will cheer me up.

Do tell, you say.

Don't mind if I do.

Alain de Botton is a couple of years older than me, and he's written stacks of books which have been, so the book jacket tells me, translated into sixteen languages. I wonder which sixteen. Anyway, he wrote this "How Proust Can Change Your Life", which is a biography of Proust dressed up as a self-help book dressed up as a biography of Proust. And it's pretty great. He finds out all these cool little things about Proust and then lays them out nicely so that you can read them and not feel like so much of a loser anymore. In his chapter on "How To Suffer Succesfully", he lists and illustrates all of Proust's failings and weaknesses and how he dealt with them, and it really is both soothing and entertaining. Here's an excerpt:

"AT THIRTY, HIS OWN ASSESSMENT: 'Without pleasures, objectives, activities or ambitions, with the life ahead of me finished and with an awareness of the grief I cause my parents, I have little happiness.'"

And another:

"FAILURE OF THEATRICAL CAREER: Despite the pitfalls of psychobiographical speculation, it seems that there were underlying emotional difficulties focused on the integration of amorous and sexual emotions, a claim best illustrated by quoting a proposal for a play which Proust sent to Reynaldo Hahn in 1906. It was to run as follows:
A couple adore each other, immense affection, saintly, pure (needless to say, chaste) of the husband for his wife. But this man is a sadist and, besides the love for his wife, he has relations with whores, where he finds pleasure in soiling his own feelings. Finally, the sadist, always needing something stronger, comes to soil his wife in talking to these whores, in asking them to say bad things about her, and to say them himself (he is sickened five minutes later). While he is talking like this once, his wife comes into the room without him hearing. She can't believe her eyes or ears, falls. Then she leaves her husband. He begs, to no avail. The whores want to come back, but sadism would be too painful for him now, and after a last attempt to reconquer his wife, who doesn't even answer him, he kills himself.
Sadly, no Paris theatre expressed an interest."

Okay, I know my reasoning is fallacious, but it makes me feel better. If Marcel Proust could write that, and if, furthermore, he could have made it to the age of twenty-eight without ever having done anything but be a worthless lazy party-boy who dabbled occasionally in literary criticism and couldn't stand the thought of holding down a normal job, and if he could, nonetheless, have developed a debilitating illness which kept him in bed long enough to write A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, well then there's hope for me, too - for all of us. Thank you, dear Reader, for bringing this to my attention. And thank you, Alain de Botton.