Marcel Proust was a very miserable person.
Like many writers, poets and weaklings of such sort, he was a sickly child, with a very close relationship with his mother and very unhappy in love. He died before the most significant accomplishment of his life, In Search of Lost Time, was published in its totality with all the volumes and revisions.
He was most likely also a gay so closeted that he even fought a duel with a man who called him homosexual. At the same time, he was known to be seeing male prostitutes, so the jig was definitely high up.
He is also believed to have suffered from a genetic connective tissue disorder, causing joint pain, loose joints and weird-looking skin, but doctors of the time didn’t believe him when he was talking about his symptoms and considered him a crazy hypochondriac.
I have never read In Search of Lost Time, this beast has over two thousand pages; I know what it is about more or less (French society of the early 20th century and the power of memory, I guess), however, I read some of Proust’s writings on the nature of love.
Since as I mentioned, he was a person of a quite sad experience, of course, he considered love to be a weakness, solipsism (the quality of being very self-centred or selfish) and a transient thing where you project your own being on another person.
However, he might have said something that was quite reasonable and that was:
To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible,
we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition
of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not
possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are
not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have
managed to see them more clearly, but they shift. (II, 453; II, 229)
That is quite general but also applies to love. It is possible to make your love less transient and less self-centred if we acknowledge the dynamic nature of another person, the fact that we understand them only as deeply as our experience has allowed us so far and we can always push our limitations to discover the foreign parts of their soul. That might let us make the otherness of another being still enticing, not letting the closeness and mundaneness kill the desire.
So why am I actually writing about Proust?
Firstly, I believe that this love and desire rule does not only need to apply to another person but to life in general. Maybe you are still excited about the rich possibilities of January, the first month of a new year where all your dreams can come true, but with time, every day will wear off the charm, and by April you will realise that you live with the old self, and all that has changed is numbers.
However, by embracing the changing nature of the world and yourself, you are opening your mind to the fact that most things are unknowable and therefore exciting. I sometimes think this is the only way to really stay in love with your life, not by forcing yourself to become a better person, and to self-development in the most capitalist sense, but by at least sometimes trying to understand what is strange and mute to you, inspired by accepting the humble transience of your own mind.
Secondly, I absolutely adore all the examples of people who we should probably consider a little pathetic, but whose power of genius and work transcended time and speaks to the hearts throughout generations.
Those are the people I find inspiring, not the young and strong, not the beautiful and popular and well-liked, but the people who rose above their suffering and delivered the work that changed the world. Proust’s health always only deteriorated, he was for a long time not well respected by his peers and spent the last years of his life in his bedroom.
I am not saying this is something to aspire to. But if you feel like your first twenty days into the third year of the twenties are not what you were hoping for, remember that at least you are not confined in your bedroom, there is always something out there to get excited about and that you might have the potential to achieve more than you can imagine, even if the person you see in yourself does not meet your or others’ expectations of greatness.
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