The World According to Proust by Joshua Landy

Author:Joshua Landy
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Proust’s manuscript page of the “style for the writer” sentence. Proust was endlessly adding to his text, jamming words inside sentences, sentences inside paragraphs; everything constantly grew from the middle.40

Bibliothèque nationale de France

Those passages are what made me fall in love with Proust. (Honestly; this is not a Swann and Odette situation, where I keep falling in love with Proust for the first time.) What a promise they make! It’s an answer to the question the narrator has been asking all book long: how to escape from the world of the senses, how to transcend what we can see, hear, touch, and taste, how to find something beyond, something mysterious, something special and secret and valuable—but also something accessible. A world complete with its own laws. A world we can actually visit.

Most of us will never get to land on another planet; there’s not much chance, either, that friendly aliens will venture out our way any time soon. We are, in a cosmic sense, alone, trapped down here in our cage of isolation. And yet if Proust’s narrator is right, then all of a sudden there are multiple Earths, as many as there are individual human beings. (“It is not one universe, but millions, almost as many as the number of human eyes and brains in existence, that awake every morning.”27) Each one of us sees the world a little bit differently, which means that each one of us sees a different planet Earth; and if we can express that difference in vision, by becoming artists, then we are multiplying the number of worlds that exist for everyone else. Strolling down a museum gallery is like coasting across space, flying from star to star.

With ordinary travel, famously, the problem is that we always bring ourselves. (Seneca put it nicely: “How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you? You are saddled with the very thing that drove you away.”28) Even if we actually went to a populated planet, we would tend to reduce the unknown to the known, funneling everything via our existing categories. But what if we could see it through the eyes of the locals? That’s what art does for us, without us even having to leave our armchair.

Proust’s narrator isn’t much of a religious person. And though he flirts periodically with supernatural possibilities—past lives, reincarnation, immortality, souls locked in trees, Platonic Forms, the unreality of the visible world—it’s very unlikely he actually believes any of them. Where he finds enchantment is here on earth, in a this-worldly, fully secular expansion of experience.29 Christianity gave us transcendence in the form of God; art gives it to us in the form of paintings and symphonies, since entering a perspective is like teleporting to a different planet. Christianity set our finite lives inside something comfortingly infinite; art does the same. (As Friedrich Nietzsche put it, “the world has become ‘infinite’ for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations.

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