And we are suddenly never quite the same

Proust and the art of remembering others in ourselves

Dear friends: A number of studies have shown that reading fiction can increase our capacity for empathy¹ and improve Theory of Mind,² the “capacity to comprehend that other people hold beliefs and desires and that these may differ from one’s own beliefs and desires.”³

These days, it’s difficult not to feel as though these very human capacities have been deeply, even deliberately diminished. The sense of something lost—agency, goodwill, communion—is pervasive. But for all its devastation, loss is never total. Things return in ways we could not previously imagine. Grace inheres in recognition.

I gather this conviction from the work of Kristy Beachy-Quick, who directs a local office for refugee service and support, and who served as the bookshop’s Reader in Residence in 2023. Her reflection on reading Proust, below, is a balm. It’s no wonder that Kristy’s recovery of lost time⁴ accords with a practice of admission and admiration for those in search of home. — Joe

Albert Lebourg, Bords de Seine à Chatou, oil on canvas, 1918 (source)

I am not sure how it began, which book it was that I finally picked up and read the whole of. But I think it was Proust that solidified my practice of reading. I spent Pandemic mornings in bed reading Swann’s Way, still in my pjs, with a coffee thermos and my favorite mug at my bedside table. Those hours in the mornings felt like the most meaningful time of my day. Proust seems to unfold time, and then folds it back in on itself somehow. And those Pandemic days were nothing if not experiments in time. It was hour by hour, not day by day (but you know this, everyone experienced the Pandemic differently, but this part was the same).

Proust partially wrote (and re-wrote, he was an obsessive reviser) his seven volumes, In Search of Lost Time, at night, in a room he lined with cork to shut out the noise and the air of daytime Paris (he suffered from asthma and other conditions called at the time “neurasthenia,” his entire life). In his final years he was confined here, dying finally of pneumonia at 51, his manuscript on the bedside table. It is a revery, a revelation, a bible of attention to a world he could not fully inhabit. If you have never read it, allow me to illustrate with a few sentences (but almost any sentence will do):

“A little tap at the window, as though some missile had struck it, followed by a plentiful, falling sound, as light, though, as if a shower of sand were being sprinkled from a window overhead; then the fall spread, took on an order, a rhythm, became liquid, loud, drumming, musical, innumerable, universal. It was the rain”

Or this one:

“Carried away in a sort of dream, he smiled, then he began to hurry back towards the lady; he was walking faster than usual, and his shoulders swayed backwards and forwards, right and left, in the most absurd fashion; altogether he looked, so utterly had he abandoned himself to it, ignoring all other considerations, as though he were the lifeless and wire-pulled puppet of his own happiness.”

I avoided Proust for many years, irritated at the way he was constantly being referenced, thinking it too hard, too arch, not for me. I have lived among writers, thanks to my partner of many years, but through most of my 30s and into my 40s I could barely finish a book, novels read over many months which I barely tracked a few pages of before falling to an exhausted sleep. I lacked solitude, attention, space.

I don’t remember why or how it happened that I picked up the first volume, but I was so lucky to have found the thing I most needed, at just the right time. To curl up with Proust every day was to open my mind to the experience of time slowing down, expanding, even sometimes stopping. Reading him began to feel like those rare times I have truly listened to a piece of music, the cadence of the sentences and the layers of deeper and still deeper attention, with an emotional payoff always waiting—an aha, a click of something sliding into place, like the resolution of a harmonic chord. I would find myself almost in tears.

Somehow now in my late 40s, I have realized that the antidote to distraction, impatience, weariness, this over-busy, over-anxious life I am recovering from, is not more time, but more attention. It is something I thankfully don’t think I can unlearn. I wonder if this is what the Buddha actually meant by enlightenment, the so simple experience of the world as it is for just a moment, and we are suddenly never quite the same.

Every morning now I wake up, and in the time it takes for two cups of coffee, I read, about 30 mins. When I started working again, when the morning rush to school began again, my family understood that this was my time to read, and I was left to it. I am beyond grateful for the habit of it, the daily way it waits for me. I will leave you with some lines from Vol. VI, Time Regained, which I have yet to begin:

“But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years—and it opens.”

1. “Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds,” Journal of Research in Personality, Volume 40, Issue 5, October 2006. (source)

2. “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,” Science, Vol 342, Issue 6156, October 2013. (source)

3. “Reading Fiction Builds Empathy,” Psych Safety, April 2024.

4. Another friend of the bookshop, novelist Will Pass, recently dove into In Search of Lost Time. If Proust is a few too many pages for you at the moment, you might try Will’s raucous tale of interspecies empathy.