When I finished reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, I was curious about what other people had to say about this remarkable book. Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997), with its intriguing title, had been published only half a dozen years before my long-deferred project to read Proust, so I picked it up. I was glad to see that de Botton had used not only In Search of Lost Time, but also Proust’s letters and journalism to come up with his advice. My first impression that was that there was more than a little of the tongue-in-cheek about his book’s presentation as a self-help book and its chapter titles: “How to Love Life Today,” “How to Read for Yourself,” How to Take Your Time,” “How to Suffer Successfully,” “How to Express Your Emotions,” “How to Be a Good Friend,” “How to Open Your Eyes,” “How to Be Happy in Love,” “How to Put Books Down.”
Some of these seem much more obvious topics than others; taking one’s time in assessing an emotion, for example, looks like Proust’s main strength, and there are many observations by the young narrator of In Search of Lost Time about how art helps us to see the world. As far as being successful in one’s emotional life and in love, de Botton does not reveal any awareness that the ill success of Swann and the narrator in these regards is expressed in the novel as a general principle. People don’t learn from experience in Proust. All they learn is how they will react to an emotional situation like falling in love, and then they proceed to react that way again and again and again. Thus we watch both Swann and the narrator replaying their parallel scenes of love and jealousy, Swann with Odette, and the narrator with Albertine. De Botton quotes a letter to Gide in which Proust says he can be of help to people in love, not from his own success, but in a general way; de Botton takes Proust seriously here and does not seem aware that the letter is in Proust’s puckish manner.
I didn’t learn anything about Proust from de Botton, though the author’s manner is very ingratiating. The wonder to me was that aside from some grammatical gaffes, he managed to write a book that could pass, among those who had not read Proust’s novel, for serious appreciation of a subject about whom he had such a wrong-headed idea.
About a year later, I began reading de Botton’s, The Art of Travel (2002). I had probably forgotten de Botton’s curious misreading of Proust, or perhaps I just thought that this book, on a topic that I find perennially interesting, would have much to say about the subject by many people other than its compiler.
To some extent that idea proved true. De Botton writes about the anticipation of travel by invoking the experience of Huysman’s Duc des Esseintes in À Rebours (1884), where anticipation is the whole experience, and Des Esseintes never leaves Paris for his anticipated voyage to London. “Journeys are the midwives of thought,” writes de Botton. Are they? What does that mean? Because of a picture in travel brochure, de Botton resolves to travel to Barbados. When he arrives, he muses about how much of real experience is left out by both anticipation and memory. Some of this experience is novel and exotic, but most is banal. Of the last, we must include the experiences having to do with the fact that the traveler must, perforce, bring himself along on the trip, and the self decreases our ability to see the novel and exotic: “another paradox” is that “we may best be able to inhabit a place when we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there” (23). Wherever you go, there you are.
A second chapter talks about the poet (Baudelaire) and the artist (Hopper) of travel, using de Botton’s own examples of a gas station/fast food place, a 747 coming into Heathrow after having spent eleven hours in the air over places around half the globe, and the arrival/departure screens in the airport with their continually changing list of faraway cities. “Few seconds in life are more releasing than those in which a plane ascends to the sky,” he writes, and this time I agree without quibble. De Botton connects the appeal of travel to the Romantic shift in sensibility that makes a hero of the outsider, the loner, the wanderer.
“On the Exotic” juxtaposes de Botton’s fascination with signs and houses in Amsterdam with Flaubert’s obsession with Egypt and the Middle East. He wonders whether the appeal of the exotic goes beyond that which is merely novel and different: “we may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide.” He tries this awkwardly-phrased idea out on Flaubert, but what seems to come through there is the appeal of the Middle East being proportional to the novelist’s hatred of France and its bourgeoisie. De Botton quotes Flaubert in a letter he wrote after returning from a holiday in Corsica as a schoolboy: “I’m disgusted to be back in this damned country where one sees the sun in the sky about as often as a diamond in a pig’s arse.”
“On Curiosity” contrasts de Botton’s lack of interest while visiting Madrid with Alexander von Humboldt’s prodigious energy in cataloguing everything during his travels to South America at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He suggests, following a suggestion of Nietzsche’s about using facts to enhance life, that “we might return from our journeys with a collection of small, unfeted but life-enhancing thoughts.” He also notes that we have to have directed curiosity: a question, like that of von Humboldt about regional variations in nature, generates excitement about the particulars of a place.
“On Eye-Opening Art” recounts the author’s visit to Provence and the towns of Arles and Saint-Rémy, and the way in which Van Gogh’s pictures from his time in Arles really do open the eyes to the reality of cypress trees in the wind, olive orchards, and the night sky. A place “can become more attractive to us once we have seen it through the eyes of a great artist,” writes de Botton, with characteristic surprise at the discovery of a platitude. De Botton describes how Ruskin taught drawing as a way of actually seeing the places one visited and asks, Why not photography? “Rather than employing [photography] as a supplement to active, conscious seeing,” most travelers who take pictures “used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.” This discovery about the tourist who uses his camera to get between himself and experience, already made by so many writers on photography (Sontag, Berger) is here combined with an odd insensitivity to the materials and methods of art forms: drawing makes us look closer, analyze, and find proportion in the subject; photography leads us to refine its own features of light receptivity and depth of focus.
In a concluding chapter, “On Habit,” De Botton uses Xavier de Maistre’s 1790 Journey around My Bedroom to illustrate that it’s a state of mind we travel with rather than a destination we travel to that determines the pleasure and interest we derive from our travels. He ends with an exhortation: receptivity and humility seem to be the keys. Did you happen to notice how well-travelled de Botton is?
When I saw that de Botton had written a book about status, I couldn’t resist. Status Anxiety was published in 2004. De Botton begins well enough by presenting our desire for “the love of the world” and affirmation from others as a parallel for our desire for sexual love. Incredible material progress since the Industrial Revolution has not led to less, but more anxiety about our status. We don’t envy those who have vastly more—de Botton suggests that hierarchical societies are free from resentment or envy of those higher in the scale. Those happy peasants! But democratization and increased opportunity means that we ask ourselves, “If anyone can make a fortune, why haven’t I?” William James said that happiness depended on the ratio between our success and our expectations of success. Media growth and advertising keep before our mind what the rich are doing and the number of things we should need or want. The author says that status anxiety is aggravated by uncertainty about jobs and the future, by the snobbery of others, and by a reversal of the ideas that have always been the consolation of the poor (the poor do the world’s work, are not responsible for their poverty, and are more virtuous than the rich, who stole what they have from the poor) with new narratives (it is the rich who create wealth and jobs, your place on the totem pole is a measure of your talent and determination, and therefore of your moral worth).
The consolations that de Botton offers are those of philosophy—stoicism or misanthropy—art, politics, religion, and Bohemianism. The people that de Botton quotes illustrate, as the Guardian reviewer pointed out, that there is nothing new in these ideas—when de Botton gets the ideas right; he ascribes to Romans and Greeks an attitude toward slaves that is really that held by American slaveholders toward their African captives, for example.
Alain de Botton had an original idea for a book that plays on the self-help genre when he wrote How Proust Can Change Your Life in 1997. Although it was based on a misunderstanding of Proust—de Botton argues we can learn about love from the book, for example, when in fact Swann and the narrator prove and say again and again that one in love learns nothing but keeps making the same mistakes—nevertheless de Botton had read Proust and was ingenious in suggestions about what might be learned from such a reading. This book, however, seems like a joyless parody of the self-help form.
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