April 2021 Edition
Marcel Proust, Sam Harris, Schopenhauer and Mary Oliver.
Photo credit: Tatiana Trostnikova. Follow her beautiful photography @tanya.trostnikova
In Search of the Time to read Marcel Proust.
Marcel Proust's brother once said:
'The sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have broken a leg in order to have an opportunity to read 'In Search of Lost Time'.
Proust's monumental work spans 4,500 pages and it's estimated to take 45 hours to read it in full.
I have to admit that I still haven't dared to begin reading it and continue to read books written about it instead.
This month I read Alain De Botton's ' How Proust can change your Life'.
In the first chapter Alain references Proust's response to a morbid question by a French newspaper L'Instrasigeant, which asked its readers in 1920s:
What do you think people would do if they knew that the end of the world is near? What would you do in your last hour?'
Proust's response is worth quoting in full:
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.
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.
The cataclysm doesn't happen, we don't do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn't have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.
IDEAS
Short thoughts/quotes from the books that I read this month.
Nick Bostrom on dangers of technology.
Making Sense is one of my favourite podcasts. Recently, Sam Harris published an audiobook which contains as he describes 'the most meaningful conversations in my life'.
I particularly enjoyed his discussion on A.I. with Nick Bostrom, author of 'Superintelligence'.
Bostrom argues that scientists often do not know what they are going to discover, and the next discovery might prove to be existentially dangerous to humanity. For Bostrom the biggest danger right now is A.I. We do not know how it is going to evolve and behave once it becomes independent from us - humans.
Mary Oliver on The Art of Poetry.
‘To be contemporary is to rise through the stack of the past, like the fire through the mountain. Only a heat so deeply and intelligently born can carry a new idea into the air.'
~ Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook
Schopenhauer on 'Force of Habit'
'Force of habit really derives from intertia which wants to spare the intellect and the will the labour, difficulty and sometimes the danger involved in making a fresh choice, and which therefore lets us do today, what we did yesterday and a hundred days before that.'
~ Artur Schopenhauer, On Psychology
Favorite Discoveries.
We started with Proust, so lets end on Proust.
This is a beautifully narrated podcast that can take you on a journey through Proust's masterpiece.
You don't have to be familiar with the novel to enjoy it.
