Wednesday, July 26, 2006
The consolations of Alain de Botton
I've been watching the series Status Anxiety on PBS, hosted (and based on the book of the same name) by contemporary philosopher and author Alain de Botton. I started buying his books back in the early 1990s when both he and his publisher were classifying what he wrote as "fiction" although he seems to have actually been writing about his own life and times - his early books On Love, The Romantic Movement, etc. Well, I find the new series as intelligent and delightful as his written work, and after seeing the episode last Saturday night, I of course turned back to what I had on the shelf to prolong the experience. And in his book The Consolations of Philosophy (Pantheon 2000), in the chapter about reading Michel de Montaigne as an antidote to inadequacy, I came across this:
"(Montaigne's) Authorship was prompted by disappointment with those in the vicinity, and yet it was infused with the hope that someone elsewhere would understand; his book (the Essays) an address to everyone and no one in particular. He was aware of the paradox of expressing his deepest self to strangers in bookshops:
'Many things that I would not care to tell any individual man I tell to the public, and for knowledge of my most secret thoughts, I refer my most loyal friends to a bookseller's stall.'
And yet we should be grateful for the paradox. Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to." (p.148)
He also includes a small photograph of solitary browsers in a bookshop, so we can further recognize ourselves in this passage. A lovely and engrossing book on applying the thought and ideas of various philosphers to the problems in our own lives today. Similar in this respect to his book How Proust Can Change Your Life (Pantheon 1997), which some academics pooh-poohed because it was, god forbid, extremely funny and charming at the same time that it was a serious academic work on that holiest of holy novels Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time. At this point I will read anything de Botton writes, and I can't say that about many contemporary authors.
"(Montaigne's) Authorship was prompted by disappointment with those in the vicinity, and yet it was infused with the hope that someone elsewhere would understand; his book (the Essays) an address to everyone and no one in particular. He was aware of the paradox of expressing his deepest self to strangers in bookshops:
'Many things that I would not care to tell any individual man I tell to the public, and for knowledge of my most secret thoughts, I refer my most loyal friends to a bookseller's stall.'
And yet we should be grateful for the paradox. Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to." (p.148)
He also includes a small photograph of solitary browsers in a bookshop, so we can further recognize ourselves in this passage. A lovely and engrossing book on applying the thought and ideas of various philosphers to the problems in our own lives today. Similar in this respect to his book How Proust Can Change Your Life (Pantheon 1997), which some academics pooh-poohed because it was, god forbid, extremely funny and charming at the same time that it was a serious academic work on that holiest of holy novels Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time. At this point I will read anything de Botton writes, and I can't say that about many contemporary authors.
