The apparent discomfort in which he worked was quite incredible, the bed was littered with books and papers, his
pillows all over the place, a bamboo table on his left piled high and more often than not, no support for whatever he was writing on (no wonder he wrote illegibly), with a cheap wooden penholder or two lying where it had fallen on the floor
.
Because Proust was such a good scholar and such an unsuccessful novelist, an academic career must have beckoned. It was his mother’s hope. After watching him waste years on a novel that had gone nowhere, she took pleasure in discovering that her son had the makings of a fine scholar. Proust could not have ignored his own aptitude, and indeed, many years later, expressed sympathy with his mother’s judgment:
I always agreed with maman that I could have done only one thing in life, but a thing which we both valued so much that it is saying a lot: namely, an excellent professor
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THE LIMITATIONS OF READING
However, needless to say, Proust did not become Professor Proust, Ruskin scholar and translator. A significant fact, given how well suited he was to academic discipline, how ill suited he was to almost everything else, and how much he respected his beloved mother’s judgment.
His reservations could hardly have been more subtle. He was in no doubt as to the immense value of reading and study, and could defend his Ruskinian labors against any vulgar arguments in favor of mental self-sufficiency.
The mediocre usually imagine that to let ourselves be guided by the books we admire robs our faculty of judgement of part of its independence. “What can it matter to you what Ruskin feels: feel for yourself.” Such a view rests on a psychological error which will be discounted by all those who have accepted a spiritual discipline and feel thereby that their power of understanding and of feeling is infinitely enhanced, and their critical sense never paralysed.… There is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt. In this profound effort it is our thought itself that we bring out into the light, together with his
.
Yet something in this forceful defense of reading and scholarship intimated Proust’s reservations. Without drawing attention to how contentious or critical the point was, he argued that we should be reading for a particular reason: not to pass the time, not out of detached curiosity, not out of a dispassionate wish to find out what Ruskin felt, but because, to repeat with italics, “there is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt.” We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thoughts that help us do so. A fulfilled academic life would therefore require us to judge that the writers we were studying articulated in their books a sufficient range of our own concerns, and that in the act of understanding them through translation or commentary, we would simultaneously be understanding and developing the spiritually significant parts of ourselves.
And herein lay Proust’s problem, because in his view, books could not make us aware of enough of the things we felt. They might open our eyes, sensitize us, enhance our powers of perception, but at a certain point they would stop, not by coincidence, not occasionally, not out of bad luck, but inevitably, by definition, for the stark and simple reason that the author wasn’t us. There would come a moment with every book when we would feel that something was incongruous, misunderstood, or constraining, and it would give us a responsibility to leave our guide behind and continue our thoughts alone. Proust’s respect for Ruskin was enormous, but having worked intensely on his texts for six years, having lived with bits of paper scattered across his bed and his bamboo table piled high with books, in a particular burst of irritation at continually being tethered to another man’s words, Proust exclaimed that Ruskin’s qualities had not prevented him from frequently “being silly, maniacal, constraining, false and ridiculous.”
The fact that Proust did not at this point turn to translating George Eliot or annotating Dostoyevsky signals a recognition that the frustration he felt with Ruskin was not incidental to this author, but reflected a universally constraining dimension to reading and scholarship, and was sufficient reason never to strive for the title of Professor Proust.
It is one of the great and wonderful characteristics of good books (which allows us to see the role at once essential
yet limited that reading may play in our spiritual lives) that for the author they may be called “Conclusions” but for the reader “Incitements.” We feel very strongly that our own wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off, and we would like him to provide us with answers when all he is able to do is provide us with desires.… That is the value of reading, and also its inadequacy. To make it into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it
.
However, Proust was singularly aware of how tempting it was to believe that reading could constitute our entire spiritual life, which led him to formulate some careful lines of instruction on a responsible approach to books:
As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. It becomes dangerous on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place, when the truth no longer appears to us as an ideal which we can realise only by the intimate progress of our own thought and the efforts of our heart, but as something material, deposited between the leaves of books like a honey fully prepared by others and which we need only take the trouble to reach down from the shelves of libraries and then sample passively in a perfect repose of mind and body
.
Because books are so good at helping us to become aware of certain things we feel, Proust recognized the ease with which we could be tempted to leave the entire task of interpreting our lives to these objects.
He gave an example in his novel of the dangers of this excessive reliance, in a vignette about a man reading the works of La Bruyère. He pictured him coming across the following aphorism in the pages of Les Caractères:
Men often want to love, without managing to do so: they seek their own ruin without being able to attain it, and, if I can put it thus, they are forced against their will to remain free
.
Because this suitor had tried unsuccessfully for years to make himself loved by a woman who would only have made him unhappy if she had loved him, Proust conjectured that the link between his own life and the aphorism would deeply move this unfortunate suitor. He would now read the passage over and over again, swelling it with meaning until it was ready to burst, appending to the aphorism a million words and the most stirring memories of his own life, repeating it with immense joy because it seemed so beautiful and so true.