A private conversation with Alain de Botton

fictional, but based on his real words

Hello intersectional thinkers 👋

Greeting from Milan!

Walking by physical bookstores that still proudly display now seemingly primordial works of Dante, Boccaccio, and Machiavelli (rather than the latest Stephen King thriller or another business non-fiction on making money on the internet), I wondered how relevant their ideas would be today. What could the enshrined thinkers of the past tell us that the modern person of letters couldn’t?

Here’s what I found in my fictional conversation with Alain de Botton (AB).

VZ questions are mine. AB responses are from his existing writing at the fascinating intersection of practical philosophy x literary biography x self help: How Proust Can Change Your Life. Minor edits were made to improve the flow of the conversation.

We chat about:

• Clichés

• Becoming a better observer

• Slowing down

• Creating your own language

• Broadening the conception of ‘normal’

---

VZ: Alain, remember a few weeks ago I dropped what would apparently be a deposit on a two-bedroom apartment in the seaside city of Odessa, Ukraine on a writing course, Write of Passage? Well, it’s week 3, my creative self is having a blast, yet my editing self is frustrated. With my writing, with my expressions, with some of the ideas that aren’t quite blossoming on demand…

AB: Tell me what’s going on with that editing self of yours.

On clichés

VZ: Clichés. Let’s start here. We all know they are tired expressions with complete lack of originality, but I find myself coming back to them. Why shouldn’t we use them if they pinpoint a shared experience the readers can relate to?

AB: The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones.

The sun is often on fire at sunset and the moon discreet, but if we keep saying this every time we encounter a sun or a moon, we will end up believing that this is the last rather than the first word to be said on the subject.

Clichés are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface.

And if this matters, it is because the way we speak is ultimately linked to the way we feel, because how we describe the world must at some level reflect how we first experience it.

VZ: Hmmm, so you’re saying our words are dictating our experiences, not the other way around.

It’s like how the words describing colors in different languages actually shape the colors someone sees.

So to get beyond clichés, we need new ways of seeing and experiencing… Any examples of a different way of experiencing the moon beyond its discreetness?

AB: Okay, let’s take Proust’s moon. He had skirted two thousand years of ready-made moon talk and uncovered an unusual metaphor to better capture the reality of the lunar experience:  

Sometimes in the afternoon sky, a white moon would creep up like a little cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an actress who does not have to “come on” for a while, and so goes “in front” in her ordinary clothes to watch the rest of the company for a moment, but keeps in the background, not wishing to attract any attention to herself.

On becoming a better observer

VZ: I’ve definitely seen this Proustian moon, though I haven’t experience it in his way. If you asked me to describe my lunar experience, I couldn’t tell you. I know I had a fleeting thought about its surprising presence, but it was exactly that, fleeting. Gone before I took notice.

How does an aspiring writer uncover their own version of the Proustian moon? How do we uncover the fascinating from a seemingly mundane experience?

AB: Well, here’s a story about Proust with a built-in exercise you can do immediately.

In 1919 the young diplomat Harold ­­Nicolson was introduced to Proust at a party at the Ritz. Nicolson had been posted to Paris with the British Delegation at the peace conference following the Great War, an assignment he found interesting, but clearly not as interesting as Proust ended up finding it. In his diary, Nicolson reported of the party:

A swell affair. Proust is white, unshaven, grubby, slip-faced. He asks me questions. Will I please tell him how the Committees work.

I say, “Well we generally meet at 10.00, there are secretaries behind…”

“But no, but no, you’re going too fast. Start again. You go into the Delegation’s car. You get off at Quai d’Orsay. You take the escalator up. You go into the room. And then? Be specific, my friend, be specific.” ¹

So I tell him everything. The sham cordiality of it all: the handshakes: the maps: the rustle of papers: the tea in the next room: the macaroons.

He listens enthralled, interrupting from time to time – “But be specific, my dear sir, don’t go too fast.” ²

An advantage of not going by too fast is that the world has a chance of becoming more interesting in the process.

On slowing down

VZ: Don’t go too fast – an advice that seems almost too controversial for the modern mind, high on productivity. How do you think about our obsession to get to the point so quickly?

AB: The more an account is compressed, the more it seems that it deserves no more space than it has been allocated.

Take the newspaper:

“That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper,” wrote Proust, “thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the last twenty-four hours, the battles which cost the lives of fifty-thousand men, the murders, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the suicides, the divorces, the cruel emotions of statement and actors, are transformed for us, who don’t even care, into a morning treat, blending in wonderfully, in a particularly exciting and tonic way, with the recommended ingestion of a few sips of café au lait.”

How easy to imagine that nothing at all has happened today, to forget the fifty thousand war dead, sign, toss the paper to one side, and experience a mild wave of melancholy at the tedium of daily routine.

It shows how vulnerable much of human experience is to abbreviation, how easily it can be stripped of the more obvious signposts by which we guide ourselves when ascribing importance.

Much literature and drama would conceivably have proved entirely unengaging, would have said nothing to us had we first encountered its subject matter over breakfast in the form of a news-in-brief.

• Tragic end for Verona lovebirds: after mistakenly thinking his sweetheart dead, a young man took his life. Having discovered the fate of her lover, the woman killed herself in turn. (Romeo and Juliet)

• A young mother threw herself under a train and died in Russia after domestic problems (Anna Karenina)

• A young mother took arsenic and died in a French provincial town after domestic problems (Madame Bovary)

VZ: Ha! When you put it this way, taking the long way home isn’t such a bad idea. But just because we want to slow down doesn’t mean we know what we’re looking for. How would you train yourself to notice what’s interesting?

AB: Read. An effect of reading a book which has devoted attention to noticing faint yet vital tremors is that once we’ve put the volume down and resumed our own life, we may attend to precisely the things the author would have responded to had he or she been in our company.

Our mind will be like a radar newly attuned to pick up certain objects floating through consciousness.

Our attention will be drawn to the shades of the sky, the changeability of a face, to the hypocrisy of a friend, or to a submerged sadness about a situation which we had previously not even known we could feel sad about.

The book will have sensitized us, stimulated our dormant antennae by evidence of its own developed sensitivity.

VZ: Notice the faint yet vital tremors. I wish I could come up with phrases like this.

On creating your own language

AB: To that, Proust would say:

Every writer is obliged to create his own language, as every violinist is obliged to create his own "tone".... I don't mean to say that I like original writers who write badly. I prefer—and perhaps it's a weakness—those who write well. But they begin to write well only on condition that they're original, that they create their own language.

Correctness, perfection of style do exist, but on the other side of originality, after having gone through all the faults, not this side. Correctness this side — “discrete emotion," "smiling good nature,” “most abominable of all years" — doesn't exist.

The only way to defend language is to attack it, yes, yes, Madame Straus!

VZ: A more convincing and helpful way of saying be yourself. Be authentic.

It’s like the fundamental principle of evolution: mutation is essential to evolution.

The point is not to be the best of what is. The goal is all about what will be.

By creating our own weird expressions, we will expand what’s possible in the common vernacular.

AB: Yes! Consider why is Paris immediately dubbed 'the great city' and Delaunay 'the master painter'? Why must emotion inevitably be 'discreet’ and good naturedness ‘smiling' and bereavements 'cruel’, and countless other fine phrases that I can't remember?

These phrases were of course anything but fine, they were a caricature of fineness. They were phrases that might once have been impressive in the hands of classical writers, but were pompous ornamentation when stolen by an author of a later age concerned only to suggest literary grandeur.

VZ: Hmmmm. So we are skipping what others have said to create our own language. To do that we need to notice the faint yet vital tremors which we find by reading and paying closer attention to the process – the mundane details that others choose to gloss over.

But what are we really trying to do here with our own language? What are we trying to say? You mentioned earlier that we’re trying to go beyond the superficial. What’s there?

On broadening the conception of ‘normal’

AB: What can replace a cliché explanation of our functioning is not an image of perversity but a broader conception of what is normal.

Speaking in clichés is problematic because the world itself contains a far broader range of rainfalls, moons, sunshines, and emotions than stock expressions either capture or teach us to expect.

Proust’s novel is filled with people who behave in un-stock ways.

Albertine walks into the narrator’s room one morning and experiences a rush of affection for him. She tells him how clever he is, and swears that she would rather die than leave him.

If we asked Albertine why she had suddenly felt this rush of affection, one imagines her pointing to her boyfriend’s intellectual or spiritual qualities – and we would of course be inclined to believe her, for this is a dominant societal interpretation of the way affection is generated.

However, Proust quietly lets us know that the real reason why Albertine feels so much love for her boyfriend is that he has had a very close shave this morning, and that she adores smooth skin. The implication is that his cleverness counts for little in her particular enthusiasm; if he refused to shave ever again, she might leave him tomorrow.

This is an inopportune thought.

We like to think of love as arising from more profound sources.

Proust offers us a picture of human behavior that initially fails to match an orthodox account of how people operate, though it may in the end be judged to be a far more truthful picture than the one it has challenged.

VZ: Write to get closer to the truth.

If I go back to the evolution analogy, by creating our own weird expressions, we will not only expand what’s possible in the common vernacular, but we are challenging the common thinking to get closer to what’s really going.  

That’s a lofty idea. A little intimidating to be honest.

AB: Then maybe I’ll leave you with this. Proust told André Gide, “Dear friend, I believe, contrary to the fashion among our contemporaries, that one can have a very lofty idea of literature, and at the same time have a good-natured laugh at it.”

A healthy relationship to writing would depend as much on an appreciation of their limitations as of their benefits.

End scene.

What did you think?

1. Original text in French quoted by AB: “Mais non, mais non, vous allez trop vite. Recommencez. Vous prenez la voiture de la Délégation. Vous descendez au Quai d’Orsay. Vous montez l’escalier. Vous entrez dans la Salle. Et alors? Précisez, mon cher, précisez.”

2. Original text in French quoted by AB: “Mais précisez, mon cher monsieur, n’allez pas trop vite.”