How Proust Can Change Your Life

An American scientist announces that the world will end, or at least that such a huge part of the continent will be destroyed, and in such a sudden way, that death will be the certain fate of hundreds of millions of people. If this prediction were confirmed, what do you think would be its effects on people between the time when they acquired the aforementioned certainty and the moment of cataclysm? Finally, as far as you’re concerned, what would you do in this last hour?

The first celebrity to respond to the grim scenario of personal and global annihilation was a then distinguished, now forgotten man of letters named Henri Bordeaux, who suggested that it would drive the mass of the population directly into either the nearest church or the nearest bedroom, though he himself avoided the awkward choice, explaining that he would take this last opportunity to climb a mountain, so as to admire the beauty of alpine scenery and flora. Another Parisian celebrity, an accomplished actress called Berthe Bovy, proposed no recreations of her own, but shared with her readers a coy concern that men would shed all inhibitions once their actions had ceased to carry long-term consequences. This dark prognosis matched that of a famous Parisian palm reader, Madame Fraya, who judged that people would omit to spend their last hours contemplating the extraterrestrial future and would be too taken up with worldly pleasures to give much thought to readying their souls for the afterlife—a suspicion confirmed when another writer, Henri Robert, blithely declared his intention to devote himself to a final game of bridge, tennis, and golf.

The last celebrity to be consulted on his pre-apocalypse plans was a reclusive, mustachioed novelist not known for his interest in golf, tennis, or bridge (though he had once tried checkers, and twice aided in the launching of a kite), a man who had spent the last fourteen years lying in a narrow bed under a pile of thinly woven woolen blankets writing an unusually long novel without an adequate bedside lamp. Since the publication of its first volume in 1913, In Search of Lost Time had been hailed as a masterpiece, a French reviewer had compared the author to Shakespeare, an Italian critic had likened him to Stendhal, and an Austrian princess had offered her hand in marriage. Though he had never esteemed himself highly (“If only I could value myself more! Alas! It is impossible”) and had once referred to himself as a flea and to his writing as a piece of indigestible nougat, Marcel Proust had grounds for satisfaction. Even the British Ambassador to France, a man of wide acquaintance and cautious judgment, had deemed it appropriate to bestow on him a great if not directly literary honor, describing him as “the most remarkable man I have ever met—because he keeps his overcoat on at dinner.”

Enthusiastic about contributing to newspapers, and in any case a good sport, Proust sent the following reply to L’Intransigeant and its catastrophic American scientist:

I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it—our life—hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly

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But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! if only the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time, we won’t miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India

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