So who would one wish to be, Robert or Marcel? The advantages of being the former can be briefly summed up: immense physical energy, aptitude for tennis and canoeing, surgical skill (Robert was celebrated for his prostatectomies, an operation henceforth known in French medical circles as proustatectomies), financial success, father of a beautiful daughter, Suzy (whom Uncle Marcel adored and spoilt, nearly buying her a flamingo when she expressed a passing desire for one as a child). And Marcel? No physical energy, couldn’t play tennis or canoe, made no money, had no children, enjoyed no respect until late in life, then felt too sick to derive any pleasure from it (a lover of analogies drawn from illness, he compared himself to a man afflicted with too high a fever to enjoy a perfect soufflé).
However, an area in which Robert appeared to trail his brother was in the ability to notice things. Robert did not show much reaction when there there was a window open on a pollen-rich day or five tons of coal had run over him; he could have traveled from Everest to Jericho and taken little note of an altitude change, or slept on five tins of peas without suspecting that there was anything unusual under the mattress.
Though such sensory blindness is often rather welcome, particularly when one is performing an operation during a shell barrage in the First World War, it is worth pointing out that feeling things (which usually means feeling them painfully) is at some level linked to the acquisition of knowledge. A sprained ankle quickly teaches us about the body’s weight distribution; hiccups force us to notice and adjust to hitherto unknown aspects of the respiratory system; being jilted by a lover is a perfect introduction to the mechanisms of emotional dependency.
In fact, in Proust’s view, we don’t really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped.
Infirmity alone makes us take notice and learn, and enables us to analyse processes which we would otherwise know nothing about. A man who falls straight into bed every night, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will surely never dream of making, not necessarily great discoveries, but even minor observations about sleep. He scarcely knows that he is asleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. An unfailing memory is not a very powerful incentive to study the phenomena of memory
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Though we can of course use our minds without being in pain, Proust’s suggestion is that we become properly inquisitive only when distressed. We suffer, therefore we think, and we do so because thinking helps us to place pain in context. It helps us to understand its origins, plot its dimensions, and reconcile ourselves to its presence.
It follows that ideas that have arisen without pain lack an important source of motivation. For Proust, mental activity seems divided into two categories; there are what might be called painless thoughts, sparked by no particular discomfort, inspired by nothing other than a disinterested wish to find out how sleep works or why human beings forget, and painful thoughts, arising out of a distressing inability to sleep or recall a name—and it is this latter category which Proust significantly privileges.
He tells us, for instance, that there are two methods by which a person can acquire wisdom, painlessly via a teacher or painfully via life, and he proposes that the painful variety is far superior—a point he puts in the mouth of his fictional painter Elstir, who treats the narrator to an argument in favor of making some mistakes:
There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or even lived in a way which was so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. But he shouldn’t regret this entirely, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man—so far as any of us can be wise—unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be reached. I know there are young people … whose teachers have instilled in them a nobility of mind and moral refinement from the very beginning of their schooldays. They perhaps have nothing to retract when they look back upon their lives; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake for us, an effort which no one can spare us
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Why can’t they? Why is this painful journey so indispensable to the acquisition of true wisdom? Elstir does not specify, though it may be enough that he has defined a relationship between the degree of pain a person experiences and the profundity of thought he or she may have as a result. It is as if the mind were a squeamish organ that refused to entertain difficult truths unless encouraged to do so by difficult events. “Happiness is good for the body,” Proust tells us, “but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind.” These griefs put us through a form of mental gymnastics which we would have avoided in happier times. Indeed, if a genuine priority is the development of our mental capacities, the implication is that we would be better off being unhappy than content, better off pursuing tormented love affairs than reading Plato or Spinoza.
A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and more vital than does a man of genius who interests us
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It is perhaps only normal if we remain ignorant when things are blissful. When a car is working well, what incentive is there to learn of its complex internal functioning? When a beloved pledges loyalty, why should we dwell on the dynamics of human treachery? What could encourage us to investigate the humiliations of social life when all we encounter is respect? Only when plunged into grief do we have the Proustian incentive to confront difficult truths, as we wail under the bedclothes, like branches in the autumn wind.
This may explain Proust’s suspicion of doctors. Doctors are in an awkward position according to the Proustian theory of knowledge, for they are people who profess to understand the workings of the body, even though their knowledge has not primarily emerged from any pain in their own body. They have merely attended years of medical school.
It was the arrogance of this position which rankled the ever-ailing Proust, an arrogance all the more unfounded given the shaky foundations of medical knowledge in his day. As a child, he had been sent to see a certain Dr. Martin, who claimed to have discovered a permanent cure for asthma. It involved burning off the erectile tissue of the nose in a two-hour-long session. “You can go off to the countryside now,” an assured Dr. Martin told young Proust after he had inflicted this painful operation on him. “You cannot have hay fever any longer.” But, of course, at the first sight of a lilac in bloom, Proust was assaulted by such a violent, lengthy attack of asthma that his hands and feet turned purple and there were fears for his life.
The doctors in Proust’s novel inspire little more confidence. When the narrator’s grandmother is taken ill, her worried family summons a renowned and celebrated medical figure, the Docteur du Boulbon. Though the grandmother is in extraordinary pain, du Boulbon conducts a rapid examination before deciding that he has hit upon the perfect solution.
“You will be cured, Madame, on the day, whenever it comes—and it rests entirely with you whether it comes