In my ongoing efforts this week to show you how cool Proust can be, I am calling upon those (in this case authors) more cool than myself to release a little anxiety of influence. So, three books with the madeleine-eater in mind as you contemplate joining me in reading Swann's Way, and weighing in on April 19 here and/or at your own blog. Books, quotes, influence and great cover design. Very tempting.
"I believe that reading, in its original essence, [is] that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude." — Marcel Proust
Q: Did Proust have any relevant thoughts on dating? What should one talk about on a first date?
A: "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't be free.' "
Q: Was he against sex before marriage?
A: "Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever possess, are the only interesting ones."
Q: Are there any secrets to long-lasting relationships?
A: "Afraid of losing her, we forget all the others. Sure of keeping her, we compare her with the those others whom at once we prefer to her."
(excerpted from Chapter 8)
"In this technology-driven age, it's tempting to believe that science can solve every mystery. After all, science has cured countless diseases and even sent humans into space. But as Jonah Lehrer argues in this sparkling debut, science is not the only path to knowledge. In fact, when it comes to understanding the brain, art got there first.
Taking a group of artists — a painter, a poet, a chef, a composer, and a handful of novelists — Lehrer shows how each one discovered an essential truth about the mind that science is only now rediscovering. We learn, for example, how Proust first revealed the fallibility of memory; how George Eliot discovered the brain's malleability; how the French chef Escoffier identified umami (the fifth taste); how Cezanne worked out the subtleties of vision; and how Gertrude Stein exposed the deep structure of language — a full half-century before the work of Noam Chomsky and other linguists. It's the ultimate tale of art trumping science.
More broadly, Lehrer shows that there's a cost to reducing everything to atoms and acronyms and genes. Measurement is not the same as understanding, and this is what art knows better than science. An ingenious blend of biography, criticism, and first-rate science writing, Proust Was a Neuroscientist urges science and art to listen more closely to each other, for willing minds can combine the best of both, to brilliant effect." (from the publisher)
