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?