It's the next article in this series, and our main character is still doing the same thing: reading. He's been reflecting on the nature of reading and books and what the experience is like.
On page 92:
"why then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows of the world, a few of which only we should have to spend years of our actual life getting to know, and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slow course of their development prevents us from perceiving them."
I've always thought this was one of the most important aspects of art and literature. It's why I wanted to be a writer. It's what has informed so much of my life.
Great literature transports us to a different time and place. It gets us inside the heads of people completely unlike ourselves. It lets us live that life and come to a much better understanding of someone else.
This is how true empathy is developed. I've always been an empathetic person (to a fault). I've never had trouble listening and truly understanding where a person is coming from, and I've attributed this to the fact that I've lived hundreds of lives through film and literature.
There's something so intimate about the experience of living a life through a great book. It's so intense as the narrator of Proust puts it. It gives us experiences we couldn't otherwise have had.
The thing Proust gets at here is really interesting: deep emotions take time to develop. You can't know what it's like to have a spouse leave you after 30 years of marriage until 30 years of marriage has happened. Yet great literature can give you a glimpse of this by condensing it down.
I once wrote an article arguing that people had the concept of "diversity in the arts" all wrong. The common argument is that it's important for all people to see themselves on the big screen or in culture.
I think that has some small importance, but the real importance comes from seeing people unlike yourself. Art is important because we experience things we couldn't experience otherwise.
I already understand what it is to be myself in my circumstances. I will learn very little in reading that story in comparison to reading someone like Toni Morrison.
Of course, this leads us back to that same problem from the last post. It is still important to live your life and have "real experiences." Art should always be a supplemental source of new experiences and not the whole thing.