So about a year ago I read this ^ book (by Alain de Botton- whom I adore) but I never published the quotes that hit me the most. But the quote from page 22 totally happened to me on Sunday when I was at CedarPoint. I saw a person who looked exactly like another person I know- he was just a different skin color! But his face, body type and mannerisms were spot on. So here are some quotes from Marcel Proust's writings and life, about relationships and reading... Enjoy!
Pg 22 -- “aesthetically, the number of human types is so restricted that we must constantly, wherever we may be, have the pleasure of seeing people we know.”
Any such pleasure is not simply visual: the restricted number of human types also means that we are repeatedly able to read about people we know in places we might have never expected to do so.
Pg 215 -- “To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.”
Pg 25 -- “In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.
Pg 131 -- It is often assumed, usually by people who don’t have many friends, that friendship is a hallowed sphere where what we wish to talk about effortlessly coincides with others’ interests. Proust, less optimistic than this, recognized the likelihood of discrepancy, and concluded that he should always be the one to ask questions, and address himself to what was on your mind rather than risk boring you with what was on his.
Pg 133 -- “I do my intellectual work within myself, and once with other people, it’s more or less irrelevant to me that they’re intelligent, as long as they are kind, sincere, etc."
Pg 137 -- The exaggerated scale of Prous’s social politeness should not blind us to the degree of insincerity every friendship demands, the ever-present requirement to deliver an affable but hollow word to a friend who proudly shows us a volume of their poetry or newborn baby. TO call such politeness hypocrisy is to neglect that we have lied in a local way not in order to conceal fundamentally malevolent intentions but rather to confirm our sense of affection, which might have been doubted if there had been no gasping and praising, because of the unusual intensity of people’s attachemnt to their verse and children. There seems to be a gap between what others need to hear from us in order to trust that we like them, and the extent of the negative thoughts we know we can feel towards them and still like them.We know it is possible to think of someone as both dismal at poetry and perceptive, both inclined to pomposity and charming, both suffering from halitosis and genial. But the susceptibility of others means that the negative part of the equation can rarely be expressed without jeopardizing the union.
Summarized pg 194 -- Letting ourselves be guided by books we admire does not rob our faculty of judgement or part of its independence… “There is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt. In this profound effort it is our thought itself that we bring out into the light, together with his….”We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel, it is our own thoughts we should be develping even if it is another writer’s thoughts which help us do so. A fulfilled academic life would therefore require us to judge that the writers we were studying articulated in their books a sufficient range of our own concerns, and that in the act of understanding them through translation or commentary, we would simultaneously be understanding and developing the spiritually significant parts of ourselves.
