Could Proust Change your Life?

One of my Spanish friends had a dream. He wanted to become an architect. He had, however, left the university and made a career in journalism. As time passed he got fed up with his work. He wanted to have a better life. One day he just re-organized his life and left his family.

It is interesting to see that re-organizing one´s life generally means leaving the marriage. The reason may be so simple that for most people their marriage is the only piece of the puzzle that can be moved.

Moving to another place to live does not look like a solution. Finding new hobbies and interests requires too much effort. Changing the job looks too risky and even impossible if you are classified as an old person. The only thing you really can change is the marriage. Breaking the marriage is possible and additionally it is also an easy solution, provided you just walk out and leave your partner to clean up the physical and emotional mess.

You may say that I am exaggerating and totally wrong. Anyway, I could make a list of my friends that have done that kind of cleaning work after twenty-plus years of an ordinary marriage.

All right - my friend left. Some time had passed when we met again. I asked about his studies of architecture. He said that he had left them aside. I was astonished, because I knew how important that dream had been to him. He had been in the habit of sooner or later mentioning that had studied architecture. "Well, in the 1970´s my ideas were unique, fresh and brilliant, but it was then. Now the younger generation has grown up with those ideas. For them they have been their daily bread." He looked a bit sad, but also a bit relieved. He had got rid of a big dream.

What does it mean to become a mature adult person? Shrinking the dreams? Loosing curiosity? Becoming insomniac? Or the simple realisation that you really have shrunk your dreams and then forgotten them, you have lost curiosity towards most phenomena in life, and additionally you have become insomniac staying awake at night not even having anything special to worry about.

Sometime ago I bought a book called How Proust Can Change your Life (Finnish edition ISBN: 978-951-1-20708-5). Maybe I have mentioned that before. It does not matter, because it just proves that I should have added forgetfulness into the above list of the obvious signs of mature adulthood.

Now my so-far-complete definition of mature adulthood looks like this: Your dreams are shrunk, you feel no curiosity, you stay awake at nights, and you forget this and that.

One remedy to forgetfulness is to buy books and surround yourself with them. In a few weeks´ time library books have to be taken back, which means that your memory extends into geographically unmanageable dimensions.

If Proust can change your life, as Alain de Botton, the author of the book, promises, all my friends with run-away husbands have toiled in vain when emptying their houses and flats after the divorce. Reading Proust would have helped and kept the husband where he used to be.

How does Proust help us? He says that we never learn anything unless we face problems, unless we suffer, unless things go astray. Proust says that a man - a male person - coming home tired, falling asleep, waking up fresh and well-slept, will never pay attention to anything important. This makes him incapable of making any inventions. How could he invent anything, if he does not even know that he is sleeping?

According to Proust only pain and suffering make us think. Pain makes thinking imperative, because we need to fit ourselves into and among it. To fit in, we need to identify the origin and range of the pain. In a way your suffering is a map and you have to define the location of the red spot with the text ´You are here´.

Sometimes we think and have thoughts that are not pushed or pulled by suffering. According to Proust those thoughts have their origin in the pure and neutral desire for knowledge. That neutral desire - can desire ever be neutral? - makes it possible for us to coldly and calmly analyse what sleep is or why people forget things. But those thoughts have no value. Valuable thoughts have their origin in the tears on your pillow and in the insistent tinnitus that wakes you up at nights.

Proust says that there are two ways leading to wisdom and maturity. One is painless because you have teachers who help you to learn something. The other one is painful because you experience the thing yourself - whatever ´the thing´ might be. Proust prefers and appreciates the painful way and he is in earnest - the last fourteen years of his life he stayed in bed writing an over-long novel in the semidarkness because he did not have a proper reading lamp by his bed.

However, the keyword in the above is ´learning´. No change has ever become true before you have learned to do something in a different way. The basic and fundamental tragedy lies in the fact that we learn anything, not just the things we would like to learn. We learn to shrink our dreams. We learn to behave in the ways that have nothing to do with enthusiasm and curiosity. And maybe we even learn to stay awake at night. No matter what habits you have, you have learned them.

Christmas is approaching. Days will be getting longer little by little. In comparison with yesterday, today got shorter only in the morning. Here in the south of Finland the evening shortening has reached its maximum today.

We do not have any snow yet, which has had two practical consequences: I got the tulip bulbs planted. Samuli hit the wholes for them with a heavy iron rod and I dropped the pulps in. With the help of the same heavy iron rod he dug a grave big enough for Uffe.

Uffe is now at the gate watching the passers by. He looked very beautiful sitting there and really paying attention to all details. If he saw something worth closer examination he went to see it. However, he knew that going to the street was strictly forbidden. So, coming back he walked directly to the bathroom door and asked to get in. Being closed in the bathroom was his punishment. It was perfectly clear to him that wrongdoings need to be punished and after the punishment life will go on as it normally does.

Perhaps we need not give up all our desire for excitement and adventure. Maybe we could start exercising our dreaming muscles so that they would be stretched back to their original size again. Should we go too far, we know to which door to return for the punishment and - as far as I know - life has a strong tendency to fall back to the normal again.

By the way, when Proust could not sleep at night, he read train time tables. He imagined what was happening in various places the trains were passing by at a certain point of time - troubled mariages, political intrigues and agricultural hardship... What else?

Effective Love and Recycling

Laughter cannot be recycled. If you tell the same joke twice, you have compelled your audience to use recycled laughter. They might try to hide their feelings, but their automatic reaction is embarassment.

Recycling jokes is questionable. Just remember how demanding it is to hear your husband - or any other member of your family - telling the same joke for the fiftieth time.

However, recycling may also indicate that you have some very special talent. Today´s paper tells about Harri Miettunen, Jean Sibelius and his music. Harri Miettunen plays tuba in the Tampere Filharmonic orchestra. If you have had anything at all to do with the brass instruments in the Tampere region, you know that Miettunen is a man of stories. The latest story is a story of him detecting majestic recycling.

Years ago when Miettunen was playing Finlandia, he was struck - or puzzled - by the perception that the music was, as if it were constructed around the same theme. Later on he realised that the same theme was repeated in Tapiola as well as in all symphonies by Jean Sibelius.

Every time when Sibelius has something important to tell us, he makes somehow use of four particular notes. He started his first symphony with them and with them he finished the seventh. No wonder he never wrote any more symphonies.

Sibelius being as important as he is to us Finns, there is a lot of research and writing around him and his music. What I find particularly interesting now is that Sibelius, having died fifty years ago, did not reveal his secret to any serious academic music researchers. Harri Miettunen is a tuba-player, in other words a blue-collar musician. Additionally he is known as a man with stories and practical jokes.

What do you think, did Sibelius do this on purpose? If so, why did he choose Harri Miettunen from the Tampere Filharmonic as his messenger. He could have chosen one of the serious academic researchers of his music anywhere around the world. While pondering that, it might be a good idea to open a bottle of Sibelius champagne.

When studying world literature at the university I became depressed. The reason was simple. The descriptions of the production of any author were summarized with he statement that, in fact, this or that individual book contained all that the particular author really had to say. Maybe, those poor authors with international fame and importance had written several books, and anyhow only one of them would have been enough to tell what they had to tell. So much work and so little wool!

Maybe those people should have chosen composing music instead of writing books. Anybody capable of reading and writing can say anything about your text, but the number of people capable of analysing your music is limited. You have better possibilities to hide your recycled ideas and be taken as a versatile genius - or a genius in recycling themes.

However, recycling your own ideas - which you anyway have somehow learned from others - is not bad if compared with copying other people´s ideas already published as texts. It is interesting to follow how important and influential people can become, just having copied something from one language to another. Here we could refer to the topic of my previous article (3.12.2007). We could start thinking, who have greater responsibility of informing the copy right holders of unauthorised copies - those who have done it or those who know it to have happened.

Now my choice of topics is leading towards a cul-de-sac. The only escape is to turn around.

Last week end we had snow and proper winter weather with some cold (-7 C). Now the snow has melt. It is warm and dark (+ 5 C). Days are getting shorter and shorter. Today we got the tulip bulbs planted. It certainly was the eleventh moment to plant some continuity among all randomness of the normal life.

I just started reading The Five Love Languages for Singles by Gary Chapman (ISBN: 1-881273-98-9). I have read his Five Love Languages which is dedicated to married couples. I know the basic message.

We all have our own special ways to interprete what love is, but if you want to show that you love someone, you need to know what he or she interpretes love to be .

You can test yoursel first: How do you know that someone loves you? Do you need to get presents to know that the other person loves you? Do you need to receive services and be taken care of? Do you need to be involved in discussions and reasoning? Do you want to have physical contact? Or is it important to you that the other person repeatedly says that he or she loves you?

I admire Gary Chapman´s practical reasoning. It is conscise and simple. You might think - knowingly or more or less unknowingly - that love is revealed by means of various services, making food, taking the rubbish out etc. The other person may just talk about love without doing any special services. Sooner or later you start feeling as if the other person did not really love you. He or she may really love you, but you are not able to understand his or her love language. It is nice to know that foreign languages are learned.

The same applies to yourself. If you think that real love is revealed by giving presents, the other person is just wasting time telling you again and again that he or she loves you. Just saying that he or she loves you does not prove anything to you. They are the presents that really show love to you. Recognizing your own love language can help you to understand what is going on in various relationships.

Five Love Languages makes a good and useful Christmas present. And because Chapman is good at recycling, you can find Five Love Languages for Children as well. The preface of Five Love Languages for Singles promises in a matter-of-fact way that "you will discover how to give and receive love effectively."

As we tend to load the Christmas time with so much expectancy of happiness and togetherness, it might be a good idea to get properly prepaired. It would be nice to avoid contradictions and disappointments and have the expecations fulfilled...

You will read one of those books very quickly, just in case.

Special Places in Hell

My daughter is talking on the phone. I do not like overhearning anything, but now there is one sentence that sticks into my mind: "It is not easy to be a young woman."

Short, well-formed sentences stick.

Another short statement I have in my mind now is by Nicholas Nassim Taleb: "We are social animals; hell is other people."

Those two sentences combined should result in what Madeleine Albright has said: "There´s a special place in hell for women who don´t help each other."

Finnish teenage school children go to work to learn to know normal Finnish working life. For a couple of weeks time they look around in a workplace and do some petty tasks. Children, their parents and the school look together for companies and organizations to go to.

A couple of years ago there was a case in court in Helsinki. Schoolgirls that had been working in a fashion shop, had become victims of sexual harassment by their middle-aged-elderly employer.

If you know anything about sex, children and crimes you know at least three things: young girls do not want to be touched by old men - and for them ´old´ means two or three years older than they themselves; adult men insist that they are the girls who tempt and seduce them and so the poor old man becomes a victim of them; girls carry the consequences in their mind and in their body for all their life, unless they get appropriate help and therapy, which they may never get, because they feel guilty and hide what has happened. Parents may never know anything about the thing and if they know, they might not believe their own child. Some of the parents avoided this trap and the case got into court.

Why am I telling this to you? It is because of the third sentence that has stick to my mind, because of the words Madeleine Albright has said in Stockholm 24.8.2004: "There´s a special place in hell for women who don´t help each other."

That special fashion shop in the centre of Helsinki is by no means run by child labour. There is regular staff there. Adult women. Do you think it probable that people who have for years worked in the same place do not know what is taking place around them? Do you think they are blind? Do you think they do not understand what they see and hear?

My mind got mixed up and vomited when I read about what had taken place in that special fashion shop. Those adult ladies did not intervene in what was happening.

I have just found a book with the title Helvetissä on erityinen paikka naisille jotka eivät auta toisiaan, the exact Finnish translation of the Madeleine Albright sentence. The book has been written by Liza Marklund and Lotta Snickare (ISBN:951-1-20640-0) The original is in Swedish, Det finns en särskild plats i helvetet för kvinnor som inte hjälper varandra.

If you want to buy that book in Finnish, you had better hurry up. It was published in 2006 and it is already on sale. It means that in a while you won´t get it anywhere.

In Finnish we have a word surkuhupainen meaning that something is at the same time funny and sad, tragicomic. Some of the stories in the book sound like that.

Liza Marklund and Lotta Snickare use examples of our normal, everyday life to reveal how life is made difficult not only for young women, but for all women. This does not mean that men, or anybody else, would always do that on purpose. It just means that the existing social power structures make the unequality producing processes so automatic that it is difficult to detect them. We all are victims of those automatically functioning structures. It is not until we learn to see how things happen that we can change anything. We are lucky to have people like Marklund and Snickare, whose expertise we can make use of.

You´ll enjoy reading the text. But beware - your world will be changed! I do not mean any aggressive change. You´ll just learn new ways of seeing differently many tiny-looking everyday incidents of the normal life, at work and at home, and that will change your whole world. This kind of teeny-weeny learning can beat paths into new worlds.

If I were a novelist or a detective, I would try to find out, which were the reasons for the adults - women and possible men - to not inform anybody about their employer´s doings. Had they themselves gone through similar experiences? Was sex included in their job interview? Did they want life to pay the young girls measure for measure?

Maybe you know Paolo Freire and his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. What we need to learn from Freire is that those who have been oppressed and treated badly, do the same when they get enough power to do that. Those who have been beaten, beat others. Those who have been slaves, take slaves for themselves. Unfortunately there is still hereditary slavery in Africa to prove that, too.

Referring to Freire must not lead to the conclusion that we should be content with what we have. Changing circumstances is not easy, but it is not impossible either. To change anything, we need to understand first what power is and how it works. Marklund and Snickare´s book is an eye-opener. They are the tiny and teeny-weeny little things by means of which our world is constructed and kept functioning with. Change them and you will have changed a lot.

I hope the book will be translated into English as well! So far, www.amazon.com does not recognize the authors.

Let´s keep our eyes open - and dare see!