Notes on How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton

I heard about How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton from Tim Ferriss's podcast episode with the author. I love French literature, though I (ironically) haven't had time yet to read the seven-volume opus In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust that forms the foundation for Alain de Botton's recommendations.

In a neat and short book, Alain de Botton goes through 9 different parts of life (such as love, reading, suffering, time management, emotions, and friendship) to distill the lessons relevant to each from the various writings (and personal experiences) of Proust.

I found the section about how to put books down and the limits of reading to be most interesting and impactful. I also liked the lessons around appreciating art and objects around you, suffering well, and expressing yourself in an original way.

I had learned about Proust of course before but not in as much depth, and I actually think that Alain de Botton's book will give me a good path to better enjoying and appreciating Proust's actual book when I get around to reading it.

Some of my main notes and takeaways on the book are below.

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​1 how to love life today
Acknowledgement of our mortality causes us to evaluate our priorities
Stop wasting and start appreciating your life and time 

2 how to read for yourself
Use art to learn about selves and cure loneliness
Finger placing ability: finding words for own experiences which weren’t named before
Book sensitizes us to things we wouldn’t have noticed

3 how to take your time
Long sentences and long books
Everything is a good subject for art
Key is not the subject but the work
Liked reading train time table to help fall asleep because would imagine stories in the various towns
N’allez pas trop vite 
Enjoying daily stories in news in brief with croissant

4 how to suffer successfully 
Jewish mother overprotective and controlling
Hypochondriac and Sickly
Made him very sensitive and observant
Insomnia makes us appreciate sleep
Sensitivity helps us learn
Painless learning from teachers vs painful learning from own lessons
Painful learning is best
Connection between pain of learning and profundity of thoughts and learnings
Suffering opens up opportunities for intelligent imaginative inquiry
Turning grief into ideas

5 how to express your emotions
Learn about others based on what annoys them
Try to find the right words for what you feel
Object to phrases used too often
Cliches just graze surface
Value originality and creating your own language 

6 how to be a good friend
Difference between writing and conversation
Writing distills and collects lots of moments of inspiration while conversation requires continuous responses and produces inanity
Why meeting authors isn’t great
Pursuing affection vs honesty in friendship
Better to separate both

7 how to open your eyes
Way of seeing the world to appreciate little things
Involuntary memory of past jolted into mind by art

8 how to be happy in love
People stop appreciating in 15 min
Habit has a dumbing effect
Deprivation creates more desire
Absence creates appreciation
Turning down dates
Curse of no interval between desire and attainment
Better to have time to wait to grow love and desire for object 
No sex before love
Threat of infidelity creates desire in marriage

9 how to put books down
Limits of books
Writers aren’t oracles
Books help illuminate our experiences but can’t replace our own understand and processing of our own experiences 
Good books can silence us
Make us unable to write or think for ourselves
artistic idolatry: don’t focus on the objects in the art but on the spirit and concepts
Worth of site is in quality of vision not in objects viewed