Transcription
[music] Marcel P spent [music] the last 14 years of his life lying on a narrow bed writing an unusually long book. Since the [music] publication in 1913 of the first of the seven volumes collectively called In Search of Lost Time, his [music] work has been hailed as a masterpiece, and he is consistently chosen by critics and the public as the greatest writer of the 20th century.
Let's take a journey back in time to P's Parisian bedroom to hear him in his own words as he reaches the end of his eccentric existence. P was once asked, "If the world ended today, what would you do in your last hour?"
Life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened with sudden death. Just think how many projects or travels, love affairs 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 forever. How beautiful life would become again. We might only have been living half a life before we face up to the implications of death.
But what exactly does a whole life consist of? Right up to his death, P had been at work on a book which set out to answer a not dissimilar question. Far from being a memoir tracing the passage of a more lyrical age, it was a practical, universally applicable story about how to stop wasting and begin appreciating one's life. What were the suggestions he had to offer? P can change our lives.
[music] What Puce wants us to do is to take our time to appreciate how rich and interesting the world is. He thinks most of the time uh we walk past fascinating uh kinds of experiences without really looking at them and studying them. And that's what he wants us to do.
Most days are the same. I suppose when one rises more or less at the same time, one has breakfast more or less at the same time. The same time being when I suppose 7 7:30 if if I business on time. Bruce's passionate pursuit of detail became apparent to people who met him for the first time and were quizzed on aspects of their life about which they had previously paid little attention.
A swell affair. P is pale, unshaven, slip-faced. He asks me questions. Questions? You have finished your twilelet with your cup of tea. And then we generally meet at 10. There are secretaries behind each of the start again please. M. You are collected by the car that belongs to the embassy. You get out of the k doce. You climb up the stairs, enter the room and then be precise m precise. Nalro vit. 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.
It might be a pristine slogan. And an advantage of not going by too fast is that the world has a chance of becoming more interesting in the process. My generation of course has read very often and he's accepted as being the great French writer of our century and his approach of course is completely new on terms of time in terms of description on terms of using the French language is very long sentences and his approach of a certain description of the reality which is absolutely new in a certain way and uh one cannot write anymore after p uh as I one was writing before him. He was a great writer, I think, a very humane man. This quietly observing eye. He was very witty. He was extremely witty about sex and love. Um, you know, like Standal, he observed his own often absurd processes with a cool and amused eye. I never get tired of Puce. I I read him for sheer entertainment.
Even the most fervent admirer would be hardressed to deny one of P's most awkward features, length. Pian sentences [music] are often snake like constructions, the very longest of which [music] located in the fifth volume would, if arranged along a single line in standard text, run on for a little short of 4 m. The sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have a broken leg in order to have the opportunity to read in search of lost time.
However unusual the attempt to compress seven volumes of a novel into 15 seconds. Perhaps nothing exceeds in both regularity and scope the compression entailed by a daily newspaper. that abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper. Thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the last 24 hours, the battles which cost the lives of 50,000 men, the murders, strikes, bankruptcies, suicides, fires, poisonings are transformed for us who don't even care into a morning treat. blending in wonderfully in a particularly exciting and atonic way with the recommended ingestion of a few sips of cafe Olay.
He read the newspapers with great care. He wouldn't even overlook a news in brief section. Thanks to his imagination and fantasy, a news in brief told by him turned into a whole tragic or comic novel. Much literature and drama would conceivably have proved entirely unengaging, would have said nothing to us had we first encountered the story over breakfast [music] in the form of newspaper headlines. [music]
P's assertion is that the greatness of works of art by such masters as Shakespeare and Toltoy has nothing to do with the apparent quality of the subject matter and everything to do with the subsequent treatment of that matter. The crucial requirement being [music] time and imagination. This leads to his associated claim that everything is potentially a fertile subject for art. Marl read train timetables when he couldn't get to sleep. It was not the departure of the San La train that interested him. After all, he didn't leave palace for years. No, he read timetables as though they were gripping novels about country life. The mere names of provincial trained stations gave his imagination the material to make up entire worlds.
Puce wants us to stop and to look at the world and to appreciate how rich and complex it is. and his own book is as it were the perfect model for a kind of heightened sensitivity that we might develop towards life. So that after reading P uh you'll never be able to think again about uh certain everyday scenes, certain everyday moments like falling asleep or like kissing someone uh or like having a piece of toast. any any of these very small things are described in such detail and such richness uh that the world seems a much [music] more interesting place and a much more livable place. [music]
His life was writing. He lived in this cockline room obsessed with his health in a quite grotesque way and um thought and wrote that's what his life was. So how many people can do that? I don't think many. He also had a private income which is a great help. In other words, he was rich.
P argued forcefully that it was the books, not the lives of the artists that mattered. It was easy to see why he should be especially keen on this. Whereas his writing was logical, well constructed, often serene, even sagelike. He led a life of appalling physical and psychological suffering. He became so concerned about infection that he decontaminated all incoming letters in a special box of his own invention. While it is clear why someone might be interested in developing a priest approach to life, the sane would never harbor a desire to lead a life like Ps. They say his asthma wasn't nearly as bad as he made out. This is ridiculous. Anyone that could have seen Musia P, pale as death, crouching over the fumigation powder he burnt each morning to try and get some relief. Wouldn't he need any more proof? But this was not play acting. It was a completely upside down life, even in the simplest things. He would ring for his morning coffee at 6:00 or 8 in the evening, write all through the night, going to sleep at 8 or 9 in the morning. Celeste, what would my life be without you? To ask pity of our bodies is like discoursing in front of an octopus for which our words have no more meaning than the sound of the tides. He gradually becomes unable to eat more than a single and unhelpfully heavy meal a day which has to be served at least 8 hours before his bedtime. Unsurprisingly, constipation is quasi permanent. Vest, pants, and shirt had to be worn to the right temperature in the oven wrapped up in towels, and they would stay in there cooking until he asked for them. Try to imagine the ceremony of the towels. I always arranged a pile of 25 of them on the dressing table. They were all sent to be laundered at Lavines. After his death, I managed a hotel on Hu Canet. It had about 50 rooms, and I sent out no more laundry there than I did at Musia Ps. I never did housework except at night. Never opened the windows except onto darkness. His room was lined with cork to keep the noise out, and the curtains were kept sealed. Daylight never entered. Marcel always felt the cold. Even in midsummer, he would wear an overcoat and four jumpers if forced to leave the huts. At dinner parties, he usually kept a fur coat on. He often had coals and more particularly a runny nose. In one letter, he mentions that he's wiped his nose 83 times.
When one is sad, it is lovely to lie in the warmth of one's bed, and there with all effort and struggle at an end, even perhaps with one's head under the blankets, surrender completely to wailing like branches in the autumn wind. Oh, there is an inanimate object which has the capacity to exasperate which no human being [music] will ever attain, a piano. They arrive at 7 in the morning and insist on manifesting their matinal high spirits by hammering ferociously and scraping their sores behind my bed, then idle for half an hour, then start hammering ferociously again so I can't get back to sleep. [clears throat] A dozen workers a day hammering away with such frenzy for so many months must have erected something as majestic as the pyramid of Chops which passes by must be astonished to see between the Pranon and St. Augusta. No [music] pyramid is cited. [music]
Bruce was born into the clutches of a recklessly extreme example. At the age of 24, in a rare moment when they were apart, Marcel wrote to his mother that he was sleeping quite well. The quality of his sleep, his stool, and his appetite was a constant concern in their correspondence. I was always four years old for her. Mama, the truth is that as soon as I am better, because the life which makes me get better annoys you, you ruin everything until I'm ill again. It is sad not to be able to have at the same time affection and health. [music]
There [music] were a succession of crushes on young men who didn't call back. In the [music] seaside resort of Kborg in 1911, P expressed his frustration to the young Alber Namas. If [music] only I could change sex and age, take on the looks of a young and pretty woman in order to [music] embrace you with all my heart. Love is an incurable disease. In love there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.
Puce was homosexual, though in his book the primary relationships that he describes are heterosexual. And a lot of people have accused him of simply putting men in drag in the female roles and being rather unconvincing and also being cowardly in doing this and not describing the kinds of love affairs that he had. I defend him against that charge, not only by saying that his descriptions of love are very accurate and very true, but also the reason why he described heterosexual relationships was that he knew that his readers were very prejudiced and that if he described homosexual love, people would fixate on what he had to say about homosexuality and not look at the universal message that he had to to express about love. So it was in order to protect the truth that he wanted to get across about love that he transposed his own homosexual experiences into heterosexual ones. [music]
When Swanseway [music] was eventually published by P himself, he sent copies to his friends, many of whom had difficulty opening the envelope. Mazel, have I read your book? You've written a book. Oh, my my little Marcel, if you sent it to me, I've certainly read it. I wasn't sure I'd received it. Yes, I can hear you. What? What? You can you hear me? Is more to the point. About a book published only a few months earlier. People never speak to me without mistakes, proving either that they've forgotten it or that they've never read it.
I am suspended between caffeine, aspirin, asthma, angina, pectorus, and altogether between life and death. every six days out of seven. However, as P pointed out, feeling things usually painfully is at some level linked with the acquisition of knowledge. In fact, in his view, we don't really learn anything until we are in pain, until there is a problem, until something fails to go as we had hoped. Infirmity alone makes us take notice and learn and enables us to analyze processes which we would otherwise know nothing about. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep. in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. An unfailing memory is not a very powerful incentive to study the phenomena of memory. Though of course we can use our minds without being in pain. P's suggestion is that we only become properly inquisitive when we are distressed. We suffer, therefore we think. [music]
What did his friends think of him? He had a great many of them, and after his death, many were moved to write accounts of what it had been like to know him. The verdict could hardly have been more favorable. When Marcel gave a dinner party, he would always eat before the guests arrived so that during dinner, he could move around and pay attention to each guest. Marcel tried to make you let him order the most extravagant supper. He told you there was no better way of proving your friendship than by accepting. And if a dinner cost 10 franks, you would add 20 francs for the waiter. So tell me more. What modesty. Marcel apologized for everything, for being present, for speaking, for being quiet, for thinking, for expressing his dazzlingly meandering thoughts, even for lavishing his incomparable praise. Marcel was passionately interested in his friends. Never have I seen less egoism. He wanted to amuse you. He was happy to see others laughing. And he laughed.
Given such generous verdicts, it is surprising to learn that Puce held some extremely costic views on friendship. In fact, he had very limited conception of his or indeed anyone's friendships. Despite the dazzling conversations and dinner parties, he felt that conversation was a futile activity. already right conversation which is friendship's mode of expression is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring he felt he could just as well have befriended it a few the artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist. An agreeable folly no more reasonable than the delusion of the man who talks to the furniture because he believes that it is alive. Friendship is a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not iriably alone. It doesn't mean he was callous. It doesn't mean he lacked the urge to see friends. However, P was challenging all the more exalted claims made on friendship's behalf. Principle among these is the claim that our friends afford us a chance to express our deepest selves, what we really think, and to be who we really are.
Miss Joyce, do you know the Duke to Adira? No. Marcel, have you read Joyce's masterpiece? No. Are you familiar with the music of Stravinsky? No. Are you attending the dinner for cocktail? and so on. Our talk consisted solely of the word no. A conversation of dead ends ending in no may not be surprising for many, but you might have thought surely Miss Pros and myself could have had a more illuminating conversation. Let's imagine that the evening had unfolded more successfully. Miss you Joyce, do you know the Duke to Abbeer? Please. Pelar James. A juke. What a close and excellent friend. The kindest man I have met from Limrich to here. Oh, really? I am so glad we agree, though I have not yet been to Limick. Marcel, do you know James's big book? Oh, of course. Ulyses, who has not read the masterpiece of our new century. Do you remember any passages in it? Madam, I remember the entire book. For instance, when the hero goes to the library, forgive my poor rendition, but I cannot resist. Urbane to comfort them, the Quaker librarian purred.
And yet, even if it had gone as well as this, and they had sat up until sunrise exchanging their deepest thoughts, there would still have been a critical discrepancy between the conversation and the work. for Ulyses and In Search of Lost Time would never have resulted from a dialogue, a point which highlights the limitations of conversation as an expression of our deepest self. To meet an author whose books you have enjoyed must therefore be a disappointment, because such a meeting can only show the person as they are in that particular moment. By contrast, a book provides for a distillation of the writer's sporadic mind, a concentration of inspired moments that might originally have arisen across a multitude of years and been separated by extended stretches of boine gazing. A book is the product of another self to the one we display in our habits, in society, in our vices. Tell me.
P asserted that taking conversation seriously is a waste of our time. Friendship could still be defended on the grounds that it provides us with a chance to exchange our most intimate, honest feelings about each other. However, there is a difficulty. If we're honest but unkind, will they still love us? Oh, making a nuisance of myself, that has always been my nightmare. What did they think of us? Maybe not tackless. Did they like us? It seemed to me that P's overwhelming priority in any encounter was to ensure that he would be liked, remembered, and thought well of. There is a lack of tact in people who in their conversation look not to please others but to elucidate egoistically points that they are interested in. I do my intellectual work within myself and once with other people. It's more or less irrelevant to me that they are intelligent as long as they are kind sincere. [music]
In the recent film of Time Regained, based on P's last volume, his concern is with how we express our emotions, as John Malkovich sensitively suggests in this extract, which also offers helpful tips on fashion. for naturalific. Come soon. P so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out a sentence. Oh, if I could write like that, I cry. And at the moment, such is the astonishing vibration and saturation he procures. There's something sexual in it that I feel I can write like that and sees my pen and then I can't write like that.
Bruce thinks that most of the time we express ourselves in a very crude and basic way. So for instance, someone says, "What was your holiday like?" and we say a really special, really nice. And in that sort of very basic sentence, half of the richness or most of the richness of what our holiday was actually like is gone. And this is a problem not just because it makes for a less interesting social life, but because it makes for a less interesting life within ourselves. [music]
Marcel, have you had any time to read my manuscript? [music] My dear Gabrielle, bear in mind that you have written [music] a fine and powerful novel, a superb and tragic work of of complex and consumate craftsmanship. We used to call this pristification. There are some fine big landscapes in [music] your novel, but at times one would like them to be painted with more originality. It's quite true that the sky is on fire at sunset, but it's been said too often. And the [music] moon that shines discreetly is a trifle D. [music] [music]
We may ask why Marcel objected to phrases that had been used too often. Aren't cliches just good ideas that have been proved rightly popular? The sun is often [music] on fire at sunset. But [music] if we keep saying this every time we encounter the sun, we will end up believing that this is the [music] last rather than the first word on the subject. And if [music] this matters, it is because the way we speak is ultimately linked to the [music] way we feel. Because how we describe the world must at some level reflect [music] how we first experience it.
When the first volume of P's novel was published, one [music] wonders whether Gabrielle took time to notice that Puce had also included a moon, but that he had skirted 2,000 [music] years of readymade moon talk and uncovered an unusual metaphor better to capture the reality [music] of the lunar experience. Sometimes in the afternoon sky a white moon would creep up like a little cloud fertive without display suggesting an actress who does not have to come [music] on for a while and so goes in front in her ordinary clothes to [music] watch the rest of the company for a moment but keeps in the background not wishing to attract attention to herself.
P felt that one of the roles of the artist was to was to break down the old cliches as the as the French put it to break the screen. Um so you can all pass through to the other side and uh go into something completely new and and wonderful which wouldn't have been possible unless that artist had broken the screen. I mean a guy who lived in a in a corkline room is turns out to be one of the great adventurers, one of the great explorers. The word oceanic is quite often used for the pruce and that is so um uh helpful because uh it it kind of lets you off the task of having to understand it all at once. For P, art wasn't just a hobby. It wasn't just a day job. Uh it was almost a religious drive. He had certain things to express and he needed to express them. That was the meaning of his life. And he died shortly after he finished his book really because he had nothing left to do. He had done what he was put on earth to do. Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work. And it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us. [music]
Monet's impression Sunrise looked a bewildering mess to most who saw it in 1872 [music] and particularly irritated the critics of the day who saw it as nothing more than childish [music] dorbing. A few years later, opinion had changed. This new technique was seen to be masterful at capturing [music] a dimension of visual reality that had so far been overlooked. When a painter sets up his easel, he'll normally be painting not what he sees, but what he remembers that other painters have seen. He'll normally be looking at the world through the eyes of other painters. And Monet for P was a great artist because he was able to discard years of tradition about what harbors look like in order to really stop and look at what harbors are actually like.
Art is the supreme for humanity and in a certain way that what is around us uh is of course very beautiful. But this beauty we understand better by the fact that artists have looked at it with their sharp eye, their sharp vision and uh that in a certain way the greatness of art is to have uh explained to us the beauty of the reality and of the [music] nature of things. I have just written a little study in which I have tried to show how the great [music] painters initiate us into a knowledge and love of the external world. how they are the ones by whom our eyes are opened. I use the work of Shardan as an example. [music]
The paintings of Shardan show us that the kind of environment in which we live could, if looked at in the right way, [music] have many of the charms we had previously associated only with palaces and the [music] princely life. After looking at Shardan's work, even the humblest rooms have the power to delight us. The only thing I would ask people looking at his works [music] is to stay in front of his pictures to look peacefully carefully to every detail colors, [music] objects, shadows, lights. And I think they will understand the greatness of Sha in in which way he is unique in the 18th century as in a certain way Marcel P was in our century. unique also by this incredible sense of observation he had as Shana had it also and this incredible sense he had of [snorts] time and in a certain way perhaps time is what is in common between P and Sha the happiness which may be found from taking a second look a closer look is so important to Marcel he believes that our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives behaves.
Marcel is writing about a certain way of looking as opposed to simply acquiring or possessing something. I think P is absolutely right in stating that anything and everything is potentially a subject for art. Um just in my own experience, I know that this is the case. You you can see something quite small and insignificant and in your own imagination it spins out into something greater or more interesting. Puce wants us to stop being so passive in our appreciation of beauty. Most of the time we only find things beautiful if someone has told us that they're beautiful. If it's got a nice frame around it, if a writer has described it, if a painter has painted it. But Puce wants us to be artists almost of our own lives. And by that I think he means that we'll be able to decide for ourselves what's interesting rather than always being guided to it uh by other people, by artists. You don't have to be a genius to be to read Puce. You don't have to be a [ __ ] to watch a football match. They're both life's pleasures. And uh you can read P badly. You can see a football match profoundly. It doesn't matter. The point is that doing it and the enjoying of it because I mean P gives uh uh fantastic amounts of of of extraordinary uh uh easy pleasures, difficult pleasures, complicated pleasures, absolutely straightforward pleasures.
Would Puce really be someone to consult for advice on romantic problems. [music] Well, he thought so. In a letter to Andre Jed he wrote, "Incapable though I am of obtaining anything for myself, I have been endowed and it's certainly my only gift with the power to procure very often the happiness of others to relieve them from pain. I have reconciled not only enemies but lovers. [music]
Well, no. But this was only part of the general difficulty of maintaining an appreciative relationship with anything or anyone that was always around. Take the unemotive example of the telephone. Bell invented it in 1876. By 1900, [music] there were 30,000 phones in France. Bruce rapidly acquired one and particularly liked the service called the theater phone, which allowed him to listen live [music] to opera and plays in Paris theaters. He might have appreciated his phone, but he noted how quickly everyone else began [music] taking theirs for granted. A supernatural instrument before whose miracle we used to stand amazed and which we now employ without giving it a thought to summon our tailor or to order an ice cream. Since we are children who play with divine forces without shuddering before their mystery, we only find the telephone convenient. Or rather, as we are spoiled children, we find that it isn't convenient. We fill a figuro with our complaints. This points clearly to the problems faced by human beings comparatively humrum things in seeking eternal or at least lifelong appreciation from their fellows. [music] [music]
Fully appreciated, often as little as a quarter of an hour. The reason for this neglect is that all of us in the pristian conception are creatures of habit and therefore likely to grow contemptuous of what is familiar. We only really know what is new, what suddenly strikes us, for habit will dull our senses. When I was a small child, no character in the Bible seemed to me to have a worse fate than Noah because of the flood which kept him locked up in the ark for 40 days. Later on, I was often ill and also had to stay in an ark for endless days. It was then I understood that Noah would never have been able to see the world as well as he did from the ark. even though it was shuttered and it was night on earth. Though Noah was 600 years old when God flooded the earth and would have had much time to look at his surroundings, the fact that they were always there, that they were so permanent in his visual field, would have given him no encouragement to recreate them internally. how different the situation would have been after two weeks in the ark. When nostalgic for his surroundings and unable to see them, Noah would naturally have begun to focus on the memory of bushes, trees, and mountains, and therefore, for the first time in his 600y year life, begun to see them properly. It would help us pay more attention to things, lovers in particular. Deprivation quickly drives us into a process of appreciation. If long acquaintance [music] with a love so often breeds boredom, a sense of knowing a person too well, the problem may ironically be that we do not know them [music] well enough. [music]
Did Puce have any relevant thoughts on dating? Advice is scanned. A more fundamental [music] doubt is whether one should accept dinner in the first place. There is no doubt that a person's charms are less frequently a cause of love than a remark such as, "No, this evening I shan be free." If this response proves bewitching, it is because of the connection made in Noah's case between appreciation and absence. The dinner rebuff being the dating equivalent of 40 days at sea. [music]
No, just before love and not for any starched reasons. Simply because he didn't feel it was a good idea to sleep together when falling in love was a consideration. Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know whether one will ever possess, are the only interesting ones. The prostitute is in an unfortunate position in the pristine theory of desire because she both wishes to entice a man and yet is commercially prevented from doing what is most likely to encourage him, namely tell him she is not free tonight. If prostitutes attract us so little, it is not because they are less beautiful than other women, but because they are ready and waiting, because they already offer us precisely what we seek to attain. [music] [music]
He merely thought that humans were missing an anatomical part with which to perform the act properly. In the pristine scheme, it is impossible to love someone physically. Given the coiness of his age, he limited his thoughts to the disappointment of kissing. Man, a creature clearly less rudimentary than the sea urchin or even the whale, nevertheless lacks a certain number of essential organs, and particularly possesses none that will serve for kissing. For this absent organ, he substitutes his lips, and perhaps he thereby achieves a result slightly more satisfying than caressing his beloved with a horny tusk. [music]
Infidelity, not the act [music] itself, but the threat of it. For P, an injection of jealousy [music] is the only thing capable of rescuing a relationship ruined by habit. When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love her. Though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy. Afraid of losing her, we forget all the others. or sure of keeping her. We compare her to those others whom at once we prefer to her. Perhaps we have now said too much. After all, there are limits to how far we can ignore the lessons of perhaps the wisest person in P's book. A certain Madame Leroa, who when asked for her views on love, replies curtly, "Love? I make it often, but I never talk about it. [music] [music]
Up until he was 28, Puce had done nothing with his life. He was still living at home. He had never earned any money. He was always ill. And worst of all, he had been trying to write a novel for the last four years, and it was showing no signs of being completed, something I can sympathize with. That autumn, [music] P fell in love with Ruskin's descriptive works on the great cathedrals. In Ruskin, he found experiences which he [music] had never been more than semi-conscious of raised and beautifully assembled in language. Later, [music] explaining what Ruskin had taught him, P pointed to one particular stone figure which Ruskin had described in precise detail. [music]
I would never have been clever enough to find you amongst the thousands of stones, to pick out your figure, to rediscover [music] your personality, to summon you, to make you live again. It was a symbol of what Ruskin had done for P and what all books might do for their readers. [music] That is to bring back to life from the deadness caused by habit and inattention valuable yet neglected aspects of experience.
The mediocre [music] usually imagine that to let ourselves be guided by the books we admire robs our faculty of judgment of part of its independence. But there is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt. Puce is quite unusual in that he spent most of his life writing books and reading them and yet he was very aware that actually books can be quite dangerous for you and that a certain point it's quite important to put books aside to put them down and the reason he thought this was because books can never give expression to enough of what we actually feel so that if we use them as our guides if we use them as almost religious uh instruction uh the kinds of sources of all our enlightenment then we'll miss out a lot of things that are actually going on in our lives. Good books allow us to see the role at once essential yet limited that reading may play in our spiritual lives. For the author they may be conclusions for the reader incitements. We feel very strongly that our own wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off. And we would like him to provide us with answers when all he is able to do is provide us with desires. the moral that there can be no greater homage we could pay to P than to end up passing the same verdict on him as he passed on Ruskin, namely that for all its qualities, his work must eventually also prove silly, maniacal, constraining, false, and ridiculous for those who spend too long on it. To make reading into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life. It can introduce us to it. It does not constitute it. [music] [music] Even the finest books deserve to be thrown aside. [music] [music] [music]