How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alain de Botton. Infinitely pretentious, you actually almost feel as though you can understand the mind of someone like Marcel Proust whilst you’re reading it, before putting it down and suddenly remembering that you’re a twenty first century civil servant from Derbyshire, England, and you understand Proust in the same way a baby understands its Mother.
Another work week done, another weekend full of plans, another evening spent contemplating the point of it all. Proust wrote a book of seven volumes and 1,250,000 words, whilst you write blog posts that barely deserve to be called writing at all. They’re fun though, aren’t they? No? Ah. You enjoy writing them at least? No? Ah. Well, they make your friends laugh, don’t they? Well, yes, but my friends are all stupid, so that’s no major achievement.
Is this the next fifty years? Log on at 07.45, log off at 17.30, eat some dinner, read a few chapters of a book written by someone more talented and successful than you, go to bed, repeat. It sounds like I resent it, but I don’t – I’ve made peace with it, and actually quite enjoy it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t wonder if there’s more to life than this. I mean, I spent a weekend in Paris not so long ago – why shouldn’t I be able to spend a year there if I wanted?
Multiple reasons of course, the most significant of which was my being unlucky enough to be born to working class parents that divorced when I was five years old, resigning me to a life of work and unresolved emotional trauma. I love my Mother to bits, but she could have at least had the decency to be a member of the aristocracy. Frankly, I’d even accept the upper-middle class, with understandable reluctance. Proust’s father was a doctor, and subsidised his lifestyle of dinner parties and letter writing. My father was a builder.
All of this is in jest, of course, and there’s nothing wrong with being a member of the working class, other than every single thing about it.
Stop it now, you’re being ridiculous. You’ve already had three holidays this year, one of which was three weeks in a villa in Turkey.
Yes, point taken, but I still had to share the villa.
Assume you had the financial backing to spend your time reading and writing – what makes you think you’d write anything of any quality anyway? A very fair point, very well made, which I honestly cannot answer. I could write my life story, but I feel like the market for fat homosexuals with Daddy issues is somewhat saturated at this point, and I can’t remember most of it anyway. Nope, I shall continue writing pointless pieces like this, and I shall continue forcing pointless people like you to read them.
Ouch. Harsh. Unfair, though? No. Maybe. Who knows? Who cares? I don’t even know who you are.
