It may have been a particularly inept kiss, but by detailing its disappointments, Proust points to a general difficulty in a physical method of appreciation. The narrator recognizes that he could do almost anything physically with Albertine—take her on his knees, hold her head in his hands, caress her—but that he would still be doing nothing other than touching the sealed envelope of a far more elusive beloved person.
This might not matter were it not for a tendency to believe that physical contact might in fact put us directly in touch with the object of our love. Disappointed with the kiss, we then risk ascribing our disappointment to the tedium of the person we were kissing, rather than to the limitations involved in doing so.
Q: Are there any secrets to long-lasting relationships?
A: Infidelity. Not the act itself, but the threat of it. For Proust, an injection of jealousy is the only thing capable of rescuing a relationship ruined by habit. A word of advice for someone who has taken the fatal step of cohabitation:
When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love her; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy
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Nevertheless, the characters in Proust’s novel are inept at capitalizing on their jealousy. The threat of losing their partner may lead them to realize that they have not appreciated this person adequately, but because they only understand physical appreciation, they do no more than secure physical allegiance, which merely brings temporary relief before boredom sets in again. It means they are forced into a debilitating vicious circle: they desire someone, kiss them with a horny tusk, and get bored. If someone threatens the relationship, they get jealous, wake up for a moment, have another kiss with the horny tusk, and get bored once more. Condensed into a male heterosexual version, the situation runs like this:
Afraid of losing her, we forget all the others. Sure of keeping her, we compare her with those others whom at once we prefer to her
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Q: So what would Proust have told these unhappy lovers if he had been able to meet and help them, as he had boasted to André Gide?
A: At a guess, he would have sent them to think about Noah and the world he could suddenly see from his Ark, and about the Duchesse de Guermantes and the dresses she had never looked at properly in her closet.
Q: But what would he have said to Swann and Odette in particular?
A: A fine question—but there are limits to how far one can ignore the lesson of perhaps the wisest person in Proust’s book, a certain Madame Leroi, who, when asked for her views on love, curtly replies:
“Love? I make it often, but I never talk about it.”
How seriously should we take books? “Dear friend,” Proust told André Gide, “I believe, contrary to the fashion among our contemporaries, that one can have a very lofty idea of literature, and at the same time have a good-natured laugh at it.” The remark may have been throwaway, but its underlying message was not. For a man who devoted his life to literature, Proust manifested a singular awareness of the dangers of taking books too seriously, or rather of adopting a fetishistically reverent attitude toward them which, while appearing to pay due homage, would in fact travesty the spirit of literary production; a healthy relationship to other people’s books would depend as much on an appreciation of their limitations as of their benefits.
THE BENEFITS OF READING
In 1899, things were going badly for Proust. He was twenty-eight, he had done nothing with his life, he was still living at home, he had never earned any money, he was always ill, and, worst of all, he had been trying to write a novel for the last four years and it was showing few signs of working out. In the autumn of that year, he went on holiday to the French Alps, to the spa town of Évian, and it was here that he read and fell in love with the works of John Ruskin, the English art critic renowned for his writings on Venice, Turner, the Italian Renaissance, Gothic architecture, and alpine landscapes.
Proust’s encounter with Ruskin exemplified the benefits of reading. “The universe suddenly regained infinite value in my eyes,” explained Proust subsequently, because the universe had had such value in Ruskin’s eyes, and because he had been a genius at transmuting his impressions into words. Ruskin had expressed things that Proust might have felt himself but could not have articulated on his own; in Ruskin, he found experiences that he had never been more than semiconscious of raised and beautifully assembled in language.
Ruskin sensitized Proust to the visible world, to architecture, art, and nature. Here is Ruskin awakening his readers’ senses to a few of the many things going on in an ordinary mountain stream:
If it meets a rock three or four feet above the level of its bed, it will often neither part nor foam, nor express any
concern about the matter, but clear it in a smooth dome of water, without apparent exertion, the whole surface of the surge being drawn into parallel lines by its extreme velocity, so that the whole river has the appearance of a deep and raging sea, with only this difference, that torrent-waves always break backwards, and sea-waves forwards. Thus, then, in the water which has gained an impetus, we have the most exquisite arrangements of curved lines, perpetually changing from convex to concave, and vice versa, following every swell and hollow of the bed with their modulating grace, and all in unison of motion, presenting perhaps the most beautiful series of inorganic forms which nature can possibly produce
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Aside from landscape, Ruskin helped Proust to discover the beauty of the great cathedrals of northern France. When he returned to Paris after his holiday, Proust traveled to Bourges and to Chartres, to Amiens and Rouen. Later explaining what Ruskin had taught him, Proust pointed to a passage on Rouen Cathedral in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, in which Ruskin minutely described a particular stone figure that had been carved, together with hundreds of others, in one of the cathedral’s portals. The figure was of a little man, no more than ten centimeters high, with a vexed, puzzled expression, and one hand pressed hard against his cheek, wrinkling the flesh under his eye.
For Proust, Ruskin’s concern for the little man had effected a kind of resurrection, one characteristic of great art. He had known how to look at this figure, and had hence brought it back to life for succeeding generations. Ever polite, Proust offered a playful apology to the little figure for what would have been his own inability to notice him without Ruskin as a guide (“I would not have been clever enough to find you, amongst the thousands of stones in our towns, to pick out your figure, to rediscover your personality, to summon you, to make you live again”). It was a symbol of what Ruskin had done for Proust, and what all books might do for their readers—namely, bring back to life, from the deadness caused by habit and inattention, valuable yet neglected aspects of experience.
Because he had been so impressed by Ruskin, Proust sought to extend his contact with him by engaging in the traditional occupation open to those who love reading: literary scholarship. He set aside his novelistic projects and became a Ruskin scholar. When the English critic died in 1900, he wrote his obituary, followed it up with several essays, and then undertook the immense task of translating Ruskin into French, a task all the more ambitious because he hardly spoke any English and, according to Georges de Lauris, would have had trouble correctly ordering a lamb chop in English in a restaurant. However, he succeeded in producing highly accurate translations of both Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens and his Sesame and Lilies, adding an array of scholarly footnotes testifying to the breadth of his Ruskinian knowledge. It was work he carried out with the fanaticism and rigor of a maniacal professor; in the words of his friend Marie Nordlinger: