Proust's Questionnairre

Marcel Proust, by Jacques-Emile Blanche (1892)

In 1886 a young Marcel Proust filled out a popular survey, today known as the Proust Questionnairre.

In response to the question, '“what is your idea of happiness?'“, he wrote the following words.

(My idea of happiness is) to live in contact with those I love, with the beauties of nature, with a quantity of books and music, and to have, within easy distance, a French theater.”

It’s a lovely reflection on what makes life worth living. Books, music, loved ones, being in nature, and going out at night.

But the sad fact is that many of these things proved to be impossible in Proust’s own life. He remained a bachelor until the end of his days, his asthma meant that he couldn’t be in nature, and towards the end of his life he only very rarely left his cork-lined bedroom, staying up until the early hours writing his “manuscribbles”, eventually published as “In Search of Lost Time”.

And yet his book “In search of lost time” offers such a vivid account of all of those things that we begin to experience them ourselves. The highs and lows of love, the perfume of the hawthorns, the sounds of the theatre, they are all more alive in his writing than they could ever be in real life.

But maybe we shouldn’t call it happiness. Maybe we should call it contentment.

Books, music, nature, love,

contentment.

Julian

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