When I was young, and benefitted not only from a fresh and eagerly absorptive mind but also from a strong belief that an eternity of life stretched in front of me, I loved to read big books, books of immense length. I read Charles Dickens – Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club – to mention just three of his monsters. I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina. I read Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain. I read James Joyce’s Ulysses. I hardly remember any details of these massive works of the literary art though I like to think that their insights and truth-perceptions became over time inextricably part of how I, in brain and heart, react to life and people.
Now that I am old, and suffer not only from a weary mind but also from an acute awareness that life certainly does not stretch into infinity, I no longer read big books. In fact I quite strictly limit myself to books which are under 200 pages long and much prefer magazine articles.
I did not mention by far the biggest of all the big books I ever read. This was Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The complete modern edition of this masterpiece is 13 volumes, 4,000 pages, long. Proust began writing the book in 1908 and when he was on the verge of his death in 1922 at the age of fifty-one he was still writing and revising it. On the last night of his life he was writing insertions in the manuscript before him in a light and shaky, scarcely legible, hand and when his strength failed further he called his beloved housekeeper Celestine to take dictation: he had some last refinements to add to the dying moments of his fictional character Bergotte “now I’m in the same condition myself.”
The edition of Proust’s great book I read when I was young was in a translation by C.K. Scott Moncrief and was entitled Remembrance of Things Past. I remember it being in five volumes and a couple of thousand pages long so clearly I did not get to read the final version produced by scholars after decades of work. Sometimes I have thought that as my last great venture in reading I should go back and complete the reading of Proust’s masterwork to the last page but my spirit shivers in the cold wind of mortality and I know it will never be done.
However, I have gone back and re-read the first pages of the first volume, Swann’s Way, the part when he tastes the madeleine dipped in tea and his jolted memory pours out a sustained flood of glorious lyrical description. That unforgettable cameo is as much as I will read again.
Instead I read a perfect little book about Proust by Alain De Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life, exactly 197 pages long and so within my self-imposed limit for books these days.
It is a book which quotes from Proust in a manageable and memorable way. For instance Proust tells us that there are two methods by which a person can acquire wisdom, painlessly from a good teacher or painfully through the experiences of life, and he proposes that the painful way is far superior:
“There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or even lived in a way which was so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. But he shouldn’t regret this entirely, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man – so far as any of us can be wise – unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be reached. I know there are young people …..whose teachers have instilled in them a nobility of mind and moral refinement from the very beginning of their schooldays. They perhaps have nothing to retract when they look back upon their lives; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake for us, an effort which no one can spare us.”
Here is Proust on the addictive power of newspaper reading:
“That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper, thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the last twenty-four hours, the battles which cost the lives of fifty thousand men, the murders, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the suicides, the divorces, the cruel emotions of statesmen and actors, are transformed for us, who don’t even care, into a morning treat, blending in wonderfully, in a particularly exciting and tonic way, with the recommended ingestion of a few sips of café au lait.”
Proust once participated in a wonderful discussion which took place in the columns of a Parisian newspaper. The issue being discussed was what one would do if it was known for sure that the world would end in a week. A man called Henri Bordeaux suggested that it would drive the mass of the population directly into the nearest church or the nearest bedroom. An accomplished and beautiful actress called Berthe Bovy expressed a coy concern that men, since their actions would have ceased to carry long-term consequences, might shed all inhibitions. A man called Henri Robert declared his intention of devoting himself to final games of bridge, tennis and golf.
But Marcel Proust approached the question seriously:
“I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it – our life – hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly.
But let all this threaten to become impossible forever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah, if only the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time, we won’t miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India.
The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.”
