Marcel Proust's great multivolume novel is entitled A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. The English translation is called Remembrance of Things Past, but Alain de Botton refers to the novel by the more accurate translation In Search of Lost Time, because, as he sees it, the central theme of the novel is "a search for the causes behind the dissipation and loss of time. Far from a memoir tracing the passage of a more lyrical age, it [is] a practical, universally applicable story about how to stop wasting time and start to appreciate life." Indeed, de Botton feels it would not be an exaggeration to call Proust's novel a self-help book. Proust was, after all, born into a family where the art of making people feel better was taken very seriously. Both his father and his brother were eminent physicians, and Proust senior was the author of no fewer than thirty-four improving books, including one entitled Elements of Hygiene, published in 1888, a book of aerobic exercises for girls. After the death of both his parents, when Marcel Proust set out to write his novel, he confided to his maid, "Ah, Celeste, if I could be sure of doing with my books as much as my father did for the sick."

The nine improving lessons that de Botton draws from In Search of Lost Time are the titles of his book's nine chapters:

1. How to Love Life Today
2. How to Read for Yourself
3. How to Take Your Time
4. How to Suffer Successfully
5. How to Express Your Emotions
6. How to Be a Good Friend
7. How to Open Your Eyes
8. How to Be Happy in Love
9. How to Put Books Down

Proust's brother Robert said, "The sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have broken a leg in order to have the opportunity to read In Search of Lost Time." The most evident thing about the novel is its great length, and yet there have always been those who, without a grave illness or a broken leg, will sit down with the first volume, Swann's Way, not knowing where it will take them nor how long the journey will be. I cannot imagine that any of those readers will deny that one lesson they learned from Proust was How to Take Your Time. The novel is not only long but immensely slow, and yet no one who has gotten into it could ever want to hurry it. I know a man, in fact, who spent years reading it and died without finishing it. He did skip to the last volume, it is true, to find out how it ended, like a good reader of mystery novels, but never got through the intervening volumes because instead of reading forward he kept going back, savouring the first three volumes again and again until he nearly knew them by heart, concentrating on Loving Life Today, a good day with a good book, and Reading for Himself -- identifying the people and places of his own life with those in the novel, and then seeing reflections of Proust's scenes and characters in the world around him, until eventually he came to feel at home everywhere, since he carried with him Proust's familiar view of the world. While many of us feel the world moving faster and faster, my friend came to see it moving more and more slowly as he observed more and more detail, in the same way that he read the novel more and more slowly until the idea of finishing it made no sense.

I see de Botton's book as a useful antidote to the two prevailing trends in academic literary studies, politics-mongering and theory-grinding. De Botton takes the old-fashioned humanist approach that art is neither remote from life nor meant to relieve human misery, but has instead a special middle place, a limited function, to make human misery more meaningful -- that is, to teach us How to Suffer Successfully. He says,

Though philosophers have traditionally been concerned with the pursuit of happiness, far greater wisdom would seem to lie in pursuing ways to be properly and productively unhappy. The stubborn recurrence of misery means that the development of a workable approach to it must surely outstrip the value of any utopian quest for happiness. Proust, a veteran of grief, knew as much.

De Botton then gives us a series of characters from Proust (patients, he calls them), analyses each one's problem and the character's response to that problem, and gives us the better solution to such a problem that is implied in the story. Madame Verdurin, for example, allows herself to be convinced that anyone who refuses to invite her or to come to her salon is merely a "bore". This is "the direct opposite of what Madame Verdurin in fact judges any grand figures to be. These figures excite her so much and yet are so inaccessible to her that all she can do is camouflage her disappointment in an unconvincing display of insouciance." How much more charming she would be and how much more desirable an invitation to her salon would be if she made light of her frustration, confessed to it directly, even joked about it. Instead she is suffering unsuccessfully. But she is only a character in a novel, and is as such the only one who cannot learn from her mistake and change.

The writer that changed Proust's life was John Ruskin. Ruskin opened Proust's eyes through his writings on Venice, Turner, the Italian Renaissance, Gothic architecture, and alpine landscapes. What Ruskin did for Proust, according to de Botton, is "what all books might do for their readers -- namely, bring back to life, from the deadness caused by habit and inattention, valuable yet neglected aspects of experience". Proust discovered the great cathedrals of northern France, Bourges, Chartres, Amiens, and Rouen, with Ruskin's The Seven Lamps of Architecture as his guide. He then endeavoured to translate Ruskin into French and add footnotes, but in time he gave up this scholarly work and, in so doing, gave us an example of the lesson How to Put Books Down.

Books, in Proust's view, even the greatest books, cannot in the end make us aware of enough of the things we ourselves are capable of seeing and feeling. There comes a moment with every great author when we must leave our guide behind and continue our thoughts alone. We cannot allow reading to constitute our entire spiritual life, or we become artistic idolaters and forgo the directness of our own experience in favour of things perceived indirectly through the sensibility of our author. I am certain that the Proustophile of my acquaintance, had he lived, would eventually have thrown In Search of Lost Time from the window of a fast-moving train, perhaps on his way to Venice, as a final act of homage to its author's greatness.

Joseph Miller is a librarian and lives in New York

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