প্রুস্ত ভার্সেস প্রুস্ত

Proust was certainly delicate-skinned; Léon Daudet called him a man born without a skin. It can be hard to fall asleep after a copious meal. The digestive processes keep the body busy, the food lies heavy on the stomach, it seems more comfortable to be sitting up than lying down. But in Proust’s case, the merest particle of food or liquid was enough to interrupt his sleep. He informed a doctor that he could drink a quarter of a glass of Vichy water before he went to bed, but that if he drank so much as a whole glass, he would be kept awake by intolerable stomach pains. A confrere of the princess whose nights were ruined by a single pea, the author was cursed by a mystic’s ability to detect every milliliter swilling in his intestinal sac.

Compare him to his brother, Robert Proust, two years younger than he, a surgeon like his father (the author of an acclaimed study of The Surgery of the Female Genitalia), and built like an ox. Whereas Marcel could be killed by a draft, Robert was indestructible. When he was nineteen, he was riding a tandem bicycle in Reuil, a village on the Seine a few miles north of Paris. At a busy junction, he fell from his tandem and slipped under the wheels of an approaching five-ton coal wagon. The wagon rolled over him, he was rushed to the hospital, his mother hurried from Paris in panic, but her son made a rapid and remarkable recovery, suffering none of the permanent damage the doctors had feared. When the First World War broke out, the ox, now a grown-up surgeon, was posted to a field hospital at Étain near Verdun, where he lived in a tent and worked in exhausting and unsanitary conditions. One day, a shell landed on the hospital, and shrapnel scattered around the table where Robert was operating on a German soldier. Though hurt himself, Dr. Proust single-handedly moved his patient to a nearby dormitory and continued the operation on a stretcher. A few years later, he suffered a grave car accident when his driver fell asleep and the vehicle collided with an ambulance. Robert was thrown against a wooden partition and fractured his skull, but almost before his family had had time to be informed and grow alarmed, he was back on the road to recovery and active life.

So who would one wish to be, Robert or Marcel? The advantages of being the former can be briefly summed up: immense physical energy, aptitude for tennis and canoeing, surgical skill (Robert was celebrated for his prostatectomies, an operation henceforth known in French medical circles as proustatectomies), financial success, father of a beautiful daughter, Suzy (whom Uncle Marcel adored and spoilt, nearly buying her a flamingo when she expressed a passing desire for one as a child). And Marcel? No physical energy, couldn’t play tennis or canoe, made no money, had no children, enjoyed no respect until late in life, then felt too sick to derive any pleasure from it (a lover of analogies drawn from illness, he compared himself to a man afflicted with too high a fever to enjoy a perfect soufflé).

However, an area in which Robert appeared to trail his brother was in the ability to notice things. Robert did not show much reaction when there there was a window open on a pollen-rich day or five tons of coal had run over him; he could have traveled from Everest to Jericho and taken little note of an altitude change, or slept on five tins of peas without suspecting that there was anything unusual under the mattress.

Though such sensory blindness is often rather welcome, particularly when one is performing an operation during a shell barrage in the First World War, it is worth pointing out that feeling things (which usually means feeling them painfully) is at some level linked to the acquisition of knowledge. A sprained ankle quickly teaches us about the body’s weight distribution; hiccups force us to notice and adjust to hitherto unknown aspects of the respiratory system; being jilted by a lover is a perfect introduction to the mechanisms of emotional dependency.

---Alain De Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life