that bend of the river which he hardly lets us distinguish through the morning mist. Yet in actual fact, it was the mere chance of a connection or family relation that gave … Millet or Claude Monet occasion to pass or to stay nearby, and to choose to paint that road, that garden, that field, that bend in the river, rather than some other. What makes them appear other and more beautiful than the rest of the world, is that they carry on them like some elusive reflection the impression they afforded to a genius, and which we might see wandering just as singularly and despotically across the submissive, indifferent face of all the landscapes he may have painted
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It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not to look at his world through our eyes.
To forget this may sadden us unduly. When we feel that interest is so dependent on the exact locations where certain great artists found it, a thousand landscapes and areas of experience will be deprived of possible interest, for Monet only looked at a few stretches of the earth, and Proust’s novel, though long, could not capture more than a fraction of human experience. Rather than learn the general lesson of art’s attentiveness, we might seek instead the mere objects of its gaze, and would then be unable to do justice to parts of the world that artists had not considered. As Proustian idolaters, we would have little time for desserts that Proust never tasted, for dresses he never described, for nuances of love he didn’t cover and cities he didn’t visit, suffering instead from an awareness of a gap between our existence and the realm of artistic truth and interest.
The moral? That there is no greater homage we could pay to Proust than to pass the same verdict on him as he passed on Ruskin—namely, that for all its qualities, his work must eventually also prove silly, maniacal, constraining, false and ridiculous to those who spend too long on it.
To make [reading] 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
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Even the finest books deserve to be thrown aside.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the following: Marie-Pierre Bay, Marina Benjamin, Nigel Chancellor, Jan Dailey, Caroline Dawnay, Dan Frank, Minna Fry, Anthony Gornall, Nicki Kennedy, Ursula Köhler, Jacqueline and Marc Leland, Alison Menzies, Claudine O’Hearn, Albert Read, Jon Riley, Tanya Stobbs, Peter Straus, and Kim Witherspoon. I am particularly indebted to Miriam Gross for her encouragement and a weekly column. For their sharp-eyed proofreading, I would like to thank Mair and Mike McGeever, Noga Arikha, and, as ever, Gilbert and Janet de Botton. My greatest debts are to John Armstrong, for his friendship and two years of extraordinarily insightful conversation; and to Kate McGeever, who endured me throughout the project, and was unfailingly lovely.