What to say when…
12 Dec 2023
There are conversations that bring up topics where I can quote books and sometimes share what the greats say. In this page, I attempt to capture these questions and the responses to them that are probably better than giving an answer all by yourself. Some of them are dark and personal, while most are funny, witty, and eye-opening. Enjoy!
When someone’s asking if they should take left or right?
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
… …
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.~ The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
When someone’s not happy with a certain prospect in marriage or questioning marriage:
By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll be happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher. — Socrates
Another brilliant one by Kierkegaard
“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.” ~ Søren Kierkegaard
When someone is fifteen minutes late at a meeting.
The notion of a specific nothingness sounds odd, but Sartre explains it with a story of Parisian café life. Let’s imagine, he suggests, that I have made an appointment to meet my friend Pierre at a certain café at four o’clock. I arrive fifteen minutes late and look around anxiously. Is Pierre still here? I perceive lots of other things: customers, tables, mirrors and lights, the café’s smoky atmosphere, the sound of rattling crockery and a general murmuring hubbub. But there is no Pierre. Those other things form a field against which one item blares out loud and clear: the Absence of Pierre. One thinks of those Czech women who disappeared from the Flore: their absence is much more eloquent and glaring than their habitual presence ever was. ~ At The Existentialist Cafe, Sarah Bakewell
This one’s personal — Why I and other folks like to plan stuff ahead and be punctual.
And were Kirsten similarly keen to examine her position on punctuality, she might have delivered her own touching oration to Rabih (and the Afghan driver) on the way to the restaurant: ‘My insistence on leaving so early is in the end a symptom of fear. In a world of randomness and surprises, it’s a technique I’ve developed to ward off anxiety and an unholy, unnameable sense of dread. I want to be on time the same way others lust for power and from a similar drive for security; it makes a little sense, though only a little, in light of the fact that I spent my childhood waiting for a father who never showed up. It’s my own crazy way of trying to stay sane.’ ~ Kristen in The Course of Love
When someone says a city is not as exciting as the other one…
the interest of a town is necessarily dependent on a certain way of looking at it. Combray may be pleasant, but it is as valuable a place to visit as any in the large plateau of northern France, the beauty which Proust revealed there could be present, latent, in almost any town, if only we made the effort to consider it in a Proustian way. ~ How Proust Can Change Your Life — Alain de Botton
Why we should read other people’s books?
We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel, it is our own thoughts we should be developing 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 simul- taneously be understanding and developing the spiritually significant parts of themselves. ~ How Proust Can Change Your Life — Alain de Botton
When its time to commit to one person in a relationship (by Proust)
Afraid of losing her, we forget all the others. Sure of keeping her, we compare her with those others whom at once we prefer to her. ~ How Proust Can Change Your Life — Alain de Botton
How to read news and idiotic business of being always busy
The lesson? To hang on to the performance, to read the newspaper as though it were only the tip of a tragic or comic novel and to use thirty pages to describe a fall into sleep when need be. And if there is no time, at least to resist the approach of Alfred Humblot at Ollendorf and Jacques Madeleine at Fasquelle, which Proust defined as, the self-satisfaction felt by “busy” men — however idiotic their business at “not having time” to do what you are doing’. ~ How Proust Can Change Your Life — Alain de Botton
Small moments and how being busy takes that away from us
“Does not the same happen, in busy everyday life, to our truest joys and greatest sorrows? We stand among other people, and the woman we adore gives us the answer, favorable or fatal, that we have been awaiting for a year: we must go on chatting; ideas lead to other ideas, making a surface beneath which, rising only from time to time, barely perceptible, lies the knowledge, very deep but acute, that calamity has struck. Or, if it is happiness rather than calamity, we may not remember until years later that the most momentous event of our emotional life happened in a way that gives us no time to pay close attention to it, or even to be aware of it almost, during a fashionable reception, say, despite the fact that it was in expectation of some such event that we had gone to it.” ~ Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
Why do we kiss people?
At one level, merely to generate the pleasurable sensation of rubbing an area of nerve endings against a corresponding strip of soft, fleshy, moist skin tissue. However, the hopes with which we approach the prospect of an initial kiss typically extend beyond this. We seek to hold and savour not just a mouth but an entire beloved person. With the kiss we hope to achieve a higher form of possession; the longing a beloved inspires in us promises to come to an end once our lips are allowed to roam freely over theirs. ~ How Proust Can Change Your Life — Alain de Botton
Are there any secrets to long-lasting relationships?
A: Infidelity. Not the act itself, but the threat of it. For Proust, an injection of jealousy is the only thing capable of rescuing a relationship ruined by habit. A word of advice for someone who has taken the fatal step of cohabitation: When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love her; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy. ~ the question is also from the book How Proust Can Change Your Life — Alain de Botton
Death?
This response is about how death always looms over us, all the time.. just that our happy social culture never really wants to talk about it comfortably.
Later that year came rumours that the Soviets were plotting to leave suitcases filled with radioactive dust in key US cities, with timers set to burst their seals and kill millions. Sartre lampooned this story in his play Nekrassov in 1956, but at the time few were sure what to believe. Radiation was all the more terrifying for being invisible and so easily deployed; the power of the universe itself could be packed into a few suitcases. ~ At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell
How we know the importance of things only when we lost them…
Another parallel to this is — you can only say that something is not important only when you have had it in life, hence only a rich man can say that money makes no sense and what our eyes naturally always discount the struggle behind his wealth and the secure wealth that he is sitting on that makes him say that line.
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. ~ How Proust Can Change Your Life — Alain de Botton
People who think that only the ones with a formal education are intelligent.
there are people who are doubtful whether or not someone is intelligent, but who rapidly become convinced that they are once they see them fit the dominant image of an intelligent person, and learn of their formal education, factual knowledge and university degree. Such people would have had no difficulty in recognizing that Proust’s maid was an idiot: she thought that Napoleon and Bonaparte were two different people, and refused to believe Proust for a week when he suggested otherwise. But Proust knew she was brilliant [‘I’ve never managed to teach her to spell, and she has never had the patience to read even half a page of my book, but she is full of extraordinary gifts’]. This isn’t to propose an equally, if more perversely, snobbish argument that education has no value, and that the importance of European history from Campo Formio to the Battle of Waterloo is the result of a sinister academic conspiracy, but rather that an ability to identify emperors and spell aproximately is not in itself enough to establish the existence of something as hard to define as intelligence. ~ How Proust Can Change Your Life — Alain de Botton
Why do people who are single know more about love than the ones who are practicing it?
Proust demonstrates the benefits of delay in his thoughts on the appreciation of clothes. Both Albertine and the Duchesse de Guermantes are interested in fashion. How- ever, Albertine has very little money and the Duchesse owns half of France. The Duchesse’s wardrobes are therefore overflowing, as soon as she sees something she wants she can send for the dressmaker and her desire is fulfilled as rapidly as hands can sew. Albertine on the other hand can hardly buy anything, and has to think at length before she does so. She spends hours studying clothes, dreaming of a particular coat or hat or dressing gown. The result is that, though Albertine has far fewer clothes than the Duchesse, her understanding, appreciation and love of them is far greater: Like every obstacle in the way of possessing something poverty, more generous than opulence, gives women far more than the clothes they cannot afford to buy: the desire for those clothes, which creates a genuine, detailed, thorough knowledge of them. ~ How Proust Can Change Your Life — Alain de Botton
When you really and truthfully get to know someone.
Proust warns us, ‘when we discover the true lives of other people, the real world beneath the world of appearance, we get as many surprises as on visiting a house of plain exterior which inside is full of hidden treasures, torture-chambers or skeletons’. ~ How Proust Can Change Your Life — Alain de Botton
Someone cannot stop pursuing the stupid and the corrupt.
They permit men in their earliest youth to “amuse themselves”, so as to know something of all pleasures, and so as to release their excess tenderness. They held that these at once sensual and intellectual friendships are better for a young man with a keen sense of beauty and awakened “senses”, than affairs with stupid, corrupt women.” Nevertheless, the blinkered boy continued in his pursuit of the stupid and the corrupt.
Love for beds and the inability to come out of them.
Loves his, spends most of his time in it, and turns it into his desk and office. Does the bed provide a defence against the cruel world outside? ‘When one is sad, it is lovely to lie in the warmth of one’s bed, and there, with all effort and struggle at an end, even perhaps with one’s head under the blankets, surrender completely to wailing, like branches in the autumn wind.’
On friendships
In spite of its limitations as a forum in which to express complex ideas in rich, precise language, friendship could still be defended on the grounds that it provides us with a chance to communicate our most intimate, honest thoughts to people, and for once, reveal exactly what is on our minds. Though an appealing notion, the likelihood of such honesty seems highly dependent on two things: Firstly: how much is on our minds; in particular, how many thoughts we have about our friends which, though true, could potentially be hurtful, and though honest, could seem unkind. Secondly: our evaluation of how ready others would be to break off a friendship if ever we dared express these honest thoughts to them, an evaluation made in part according to our sense of how loveable we are, and of whether our qualities would be enough to ensure that we could stay friends with people even if we had momentarily irritated them by revealing our disapproval of their fiancée or lyric poetry.
One more
Given the effort and strategic intelligence he devoted to friendship, it shouldn’t surprise us. For instance, 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.
Why listen more to friends even when you least care about the thing they are talking about?
It accounts for why Proust’s friend Georges de Lauris, a keen rally driver and tennis player, could gratefully report that he had often talked to Proust about sport and motor cars. Of course, Proust cared little for either, but to have insisted on turning the conversation to Mme de Pompa- dour’s childhood with a man keener on Renault’s crankshaft would have been to misunderstand what friendship was for.
Reading and friendship connection
Proust once compared friendship to reading, because both activities involved communion with others, but added that reading had a key advantage: In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original purity. There is no false amiability with books. If we spend the evening with these friends, it is because we genuinely want to.
When you have not spoken to a friend in a while
How are we to respond to the level of insincerity apparently required in every friendship? How are we to respond to the two habitually conflicting projects carried on under the single umbrella of friendship, a project to secure affection, and a project to express ourselves honestly? It was because Proust was both unusually honest and unusually affectionate that he drove the joint project to breaking point and came up with his distinctive approach to friendship, which was to judge that the pursuit of affection and the pursuit of truth were fundamentally rather than occasionally incom- patible. It meant adopting a much narrower conception of what friendship was for: it was for playful exchanges with Laure, but not for telling Molière that he was boring and Anna de Noailles that she couldn’t write poetry. One might imagine that it made Proust a far lesser friend, but paradoxically the radical separation had the power to make him both a better, more loyal, more charming friend, and a more honest, profound and unsentimental thinker.
~ How Proust Can Change Your Life — Alain de Botton
I plan to update this page every now and then, have you got any? do share!
