today—on which you realise that there is nothing wrong with you and resume your ordinary life. You tell me that you have not been eating, not going out?”
“But, Doctor, I have a temperature.”
“Not just now at any rate. Besides, what a splendid excuse! Don’t you know that we feed up tuberculosis patients with temperatures of 102 and keep them out in the open air?”
Unable to resist the arguments of this exalted medical man, the grandmother forces herself out of bed, takes her grandson with her, and painfully negotiates her way to the Champs-Élysées for the sake of fresh air. Naturally, the trip kills her.
Should a convinced Proustian ever visit a doctor? Marcel, the son and brother of surgeons, ended up with an equivocal, even surprisingly generous, verdict on the profession:
To believe in medicine would be the height of folly, if not to believe in it were not a greater folly still
.
Proustian logic would nevertheless point to the wisdom of seeking out doctors who are themselves frequently afflicted by grave illness.
It now seems as if the magnitude of Proust’s misfortunes should not be allowed to cast doubt on the validity of his ideas. Indeed, it is the very extent of his suffering that we should take to be evidence of the perfect precondition for insights. It is when we hear that Proust’s lover died in a plane crash off the coast of Antibes, or that Stendhal endured a series of agonizing unrequited passions, or that Nietzsche was a social outcast taunted by schoolboys, that we can be reassured of having discovered valuable intellectual authorities. It is not the contented or the glowing who have left many of the profound testimonies of what it means to be alive. It seems that such knowledge has usually been the privileged preserve of, and the only blessing granted to, the violently miserable.
Nevertheless, before subscribing uncritically to a Romantic cult of suffering, it should be added that suffering has, on its own, never been quite enough. It is, unfortunately, easier to lose a lover than complete In Search of Lost Time, to experience unrequited desire than write De l’amour, to be socially unpopular than the author of The Birth of Tragedy. Many unhappy syphilitics omit to write their Fleurs du mal, and shoot themselves instead. Perhaps the greatest claim one can therefore make for suffering is that it opens up possibilities for intelligent, imaginative inquiry—possibilities that may quite easily be, and most often are, overlooked or refused.
How can we do neither? Even if the creation of a masterpiece plays no part in the ambition, how can we learn to suffer more successfully? 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.
The whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we suffer
.
What would such an art of living involve? For a Proustian, the task is to gain a better understanding of reality. Pain is surprising: we cannot understand why we have been abandoned in love or left off an invitation list, why we are unable to sleep at night or wander through pollinating meadows in spring. Identifying reasons for such discomforts does not spectacularly absolve us of pain, but it may form the principal basis of a recovery. While assuring us that we are not uniquely cursed, understanding grants us a sense of the boundaries to, and bitter logic behind, our suffering.
Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart
.
However, only too frequently, suffering fails to alchemize into ideas and, instead of affording us a better sense of reality, pushes us into a baneful direction where we learn nothing new, where we are subject to many more illusions and entertain far fewer vital thoughts than if we had never suffered to begin with. Proust’s novel is filled with those we might call bad sufferers, wretched souls who have been betrayed in love or excluded from parties, who are pained by a feeling of intellectual inadequacy or a sense of social inferiority, but who learn nothing from such ills, and indeed react to them by engaging a variety of ruinous defense mechanisms which entail arrogance and delusion, cruelty and callousness, spite and rage.
Without doing them an injustice, it may be possible to lift a number of these unfortunate sufferers from the novel, so as to consider what is ailing them, the Proustian inadequacy of their defenses, and to propose, in a gently therapeutic spirit, certain more fruitful responses.
PATIENT NO. 1: Madame Verdurin, the bourgeois mistress of a salon that gathers to discuss art and politics, and which she calls her “little clan.” Very much moved by art, she develops headaches when overcome by the beauty of music, and on one occasion dislocates her jaw by laughing too much.
PROBLEM: Madame Verdurin has dedicated her life to rising in the social world, but she finds herself ignored by those she most desires to know. She is not on the invitation lists of the best aristocratic families; she would be unwelcome at the salon of the Duchesse de Guermantes; her own salon is filled only with members of her social class; and the President of the French Republic has never invited her to have lunch in the Élysée Palace—though he has invited Charles Swann, a man she considers to be no more elevated in the world than she is.
RESPONSE TO PROBLEM: There are few outward signs that Madame Verdurin is bothered by her situation. She asserts with apparent conviction that anyone who refuses to invite her or come to her salon is merely a “bore.” Even the President, Jules Grévy, is a bore.
The word is perversely appropriate, for it is the direct opposite of what Madame Verdurin in fact judges any grand figure 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.
When Swann carelessly lets slip at the Verdurin salon that he is lunching with President Grévy, the envy of the other guests is palpable, and so as to dispel it, Swann quickly adopts a deprecating line:
“I assure you, his luncheon-parties are not in the least bit amusing. They’re very simple affairs too, you know—never more than eight at table.”
Others might have recognized Swann’s remark to be mere politeness, but Madame Verdurin is too distressed to ignore any suggestion that what she does not have is not worth having:
“I can easily believe that you don’t find them amusing, those luncheons. Indeed, it’s very good of you to go to them.… I’ve heard [the President] is as deaf as a post and eats with his fingers.”
A BETTER SOLUTION: Why is Madame Verdurin suffering badly? Because we always lack more than we have, and because there are always more people who don’t invite us than who do. Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.
How much more honest to keep in mind that although we might like to meet the President, he doesn’t want to meet us, and that this detail is no reason to reinvent our level of interest in him. Madame Verdurin might come to understand the mechanisms by which people are excluded from social circles; she could learn to make light of her frustration, confess to it directly, even throw out a teasing remark to Swann asking him to return with a signed menu, and in the process might become so charming that an invitation to the Élysée would make its way to her after all.