no one told me about proust

on poptimism and literary snobs ✦ and why taste is cultivated through love, not education

In 2022, I decided to spend the year reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. At the time, I knew nothing about Proust:

• a bourgeois, assimilated French Jew who spent much of his life at the salons and society events of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, ingratiating himself with aristocrats and artists alike;

• a practitioner of anti-work avant la lettre, who—when his father insisted he pursue a profession—chose to volunteer at a public library, never showed up, and extended his sick leave for years;

• a neurasthenic who, in the last three years of his life, locked himself up in a cork-lined apartment, ate an unbalanced diet of coffee and 1–2 croissants a day, and became largely nocturnal;

• and the writer of a 3,000-page book that is, arguably, the greatest novel of the twentieth century.

Jacques-Émile Blanche, portrait of a 21-year-old Marcel Proust (1892)

I'd left college without taking a single literature class. Instead, I learned how to program and use Photoshop. So no one told me—I’d somehow missed this!—that In Search of Lost Time was a masterpiece of modernist literature. (I didn’t know what modernist literature was, either.) No one told me that it was famously difficult and exhausting to read. All I knew was that Lydia Davis—the queen of the very short story, the grand dame of American flash fiction—had once said:

You can write three thousand pages (as Proust did in In Search of Lost Time) and still be economical.

I read Proust because I wanted to understand what Lydia Davis saw in him. And from the very first page—with that deceptively, winsomely ordinary beginning: For a long time, I went to sleep early—I was charmed:

For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes, my candle scarcely out, my eyes would close so quickly that I did not have time to say to myself: “I’m falling asleep.” And, half an hour later, the thought that it was time to try to sleep would wake me; I wanted to put down the book I thought I still had in my hands and blow out my light; I had not ceased while sleeping to form reflections on what I had just read, but these reflections had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was what the book was talking about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This belief lived on for a few seconds after my waking; it did not shock my reason but lay heavy like scales on my eyes and kept them from realizing that the candlestick was no longer lit.¹

For the next 291 days, the novel accompanied me everywhere. I brought vol. 1, The Way By Swann's, on a train from San Francisco to Los Angeles; and when I needed a reprieve from Charles Swann’s obsession with Odette de Crécy (one of the most successful sugar babies in the literary canon), I would rest my eyes by looking out into the arid Californian landscape, which was now layered over with scenes from Madame Verdurin’s salon, where Swann and his lover would meet. I brought vol. 4, Sodom and Gomorrah, on a vacation to Milan—and, lying awake after my friends had gone to sleep, I would indulge in Proust's descriptions of the night:

The moon was in the sky now like a quarter of orange, delicately peeled but with a small bite out of it. Later it would be made of the most resistant gold. Huddled all alone behind it, a poor little star was about to serve as the solitary moon’s one companion…

And during the day, as I observed the unfamiliar faces of strangers on the metro, I could read about the young Marcel's brief, instantaneous crush on a woman on the train:

I have never again met nor identified the beautiful girl with the cigarette. We shall see, moreover, why for a long time I had to leave off searching for her. But I have not forgotten her. It often happens that when I am thinking of her I am seized by a wild longing. But these recurrences of desire force us to reflect that, if we wanted to meet these girls again with the same pleasure, we should have also to go back to the year in question…We can sometimes find a person again, but not abolish time.

Everything about In Search of Lost Time was extraordinary—beautiful and funny and remarkable and strange. It was like nothing I had ever read before. I was enthralled. I was also upset. Why had no one told me that Proust would be like this?

Still from Chantal Akerman’s film The Captive (2000), which is based on vol. 5 of In Search of Lost Time

It was the same feeling that the essayist Elisa Gabbert, in one of her Paris Review columns on reading canonical works, described:

I pulled Swann’s Way off the shelf, read the first paragraph, and was astonished. Its obsessive attention to memory, time, and the minutiae of experience as it occurs through thinking—it was not just good. It was, as they say, extremely my shit. Everyone says you should read Proust, but no one had ever told me that I, specifically, should read Proust.

Yes, the novel was about memory and madeleines and time—but it was also about gossip, gay sex, frivolously spending money, social climbing, getting a song (more specifically, a sonata) stuck in your head, grieving a grandparent, political scandals, and perpetual dissatisfaction in love. When I finished the novel, something had changed within me—I experienced language, literature, life in a new way. The novel is, as the literary scholar Roger Shattuck wrote, “intimately concern[ed]…[with] human beings faced with the appalling responsibility of living our lives.”

There are two distinct periods of my life: Before Proust and After Proust. After Proust I was no longer someone who merely read books; I was obsessed with them. I couldn't stop talking about Proust! He was the friend I wanted to introduce to everyone I loved; his was the novel where everything important—art, love, friendship, science, beauty, morality, desire—could be found.²

This newsletter is about why you, specifically, should read Proust—but it’s also about why, and how, we ought to approach the literary greats.

In this post — Elissa Gabbert on Proust ✦ Roger Shattuck, Proust’s Binoculars ✦

Henry Begler

on poptimism ✦ W. David Marx on cultural decline ✦

Ottessa Moshfegh

on consciousness ✦ Zachary Fine on Schjeldahl ✦ Daisy Alioto on taste ✦ Charles Broskoski on how to change your trajectory

The (un)importance of being well-read

Before Proust, however, I was not someone who read literature. I was suspicious of it and alienated from the entire project of reading the “classics,” the “canon,” the “great books.” Literature, I assumed, was for people who explicitly pursued distinction, who were proud of their elevated taste. I couldn’t relate to this; I believed it was better to be ordinary, virtuous to be humble. (I might have inherited this from my parents, who—after a childhood in communist Vietnam—preferred to live quietly, dress normally, and behave inconspicuously.³)

But I loved to read. I just wasn’t invested in being ‘well-read,’ and so I never sought out David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or any of the books that established someone as a serious reader. What did I read? A lot of manga, mostly. A lot of YA fiction (especially when I was, appropriately, a young adult myself). A lot of fantasy and sci-fi that had fans, that people had fun with. Whenever people spoke of capital L Literature, it seemed like a deadly dull status game. The point of reading Infinite Jest seemed to be that DFW was an Important Writer, who had written an Important Book, and the importance seemed to be largely about how long and unyieldingly difficult it was. I was allergic to the life that this implied—a life where you read things because you were “supposed” to, not because you wanted to.

Before Proust, I assumed that high culture was for snobs, and pop culture was for the people—it was where you actually enjoyed books, films, music, art. And yet. I was reading so many bad books: unsatisfying, superficial, insubstantial.

I would sometimes encounter books that were different. I could recognize the greater ambitions behind these books, the seriousness and simultaneous levity they brought to the project of placing words on a page, one after another—words that seemed to resonate much more deeply than the other books I had read. Sometimes, I discovered these books by mistake: I read Maggie Nelson’s Bluets in college, for example, while taking a color theory class—I assumed, based on the title, that it would help me with my homework. But often, it was because someone I knew gently pressed a copy of the book into my hands.

Snobbery didn’t motivate me; passion did. I wanted to read the books that others loved. It was Lydia Davis’s unyielding love for Proust that convinced me to read him. Reading In Search of Lost Time, I realized that Proust described certain experiences—being conscious, perceiving reality, observing the world, encountering other people—with a kind of trembling, vital energy I had never experienced before. Every page was rich with sensations and ideas—and every I spent reading the novel seemed to overflow with things to savor, because, as Proust wrote in vol. 7, Finding Time Again:

An hour is not just an hour, it is a vessel full of perfumes, sounds, plans and atmospheres.

And the novel was funny! It was gossipy and scandalous and depraved! It was like reality TV, but better, because when I put the novel down I felt that my understanding of human nature wasn’t flattened out and sensationalized—instead, I saw how complex, contradictory, and fascinating people could be.

Stanislas Merhar and Sylvie Testud as the young Marcel and Albertine of vol. 5, The Prisoner, in Chantal Akerman’s film La Captive (2000)

Poptimism is keeping you from the really good books!

Why had I never read Proust before? Because I was a victim of what

Henry Begler

(in one of the best and most invigorating newsletters I’ve read on Substack) has described as a “vulgar poptimism,” where

everything is just as good as everything else and no one actually likes anything challenging—they’re lying to themselves, or to you.

This was why I clung onto pop culture for so long—because I thought that the “challenging” books (and films, and music, and performances) were less enjoyable. Reading Proust showed me that this was false. The supposedly impenetrable, inscrutable, overtly intellectual works—they were better, not because they offered more cultural capital and clout, but because they made me feel alive.⁴

I had essentially discovered what W. David Marx—the writer of Ametora and Status and Culture, which I read in February 2024—describes as the difference between entertainment and art. In a recent newsletter, Marx observed that, in the twentieth century:

Most elites believed that “art” described a rarified sphere…which stood in opposition to the "mass culture" of bland, sensationalist, lowest-common-denominator works made for profit. There was no confusing the two worlds, because there was a very high bar for what qualified as “art.” The avant-garde concept of art was something like “creative alterations of established conventions within an aesthetic context that provide new stimulus, and in the best cases, force the audiences out of their basic cognitive modes to perceive stimulus in new ways”…

Not every creative endeavor provides the same degree of originality or formalistic mastery. A child's finger-painting is not equivalent to a Rothko. A work only verges towards art in challenging or playing with the existing conventions to create new aesthetic effects. Entertainment is a different kind of creative endeavor. It doesn't need to tinker with our brains. It just needs to provide enough stimulus to momentarily keep an audience's attention, and it can usually achieve this by tapping well-tested conventional formulas.

The unexpected economy of a Proustian sentence

One of the aesthetic effects that is so distinctively Proustian, so formally masterful and remarkable, is the way in which his sentences leap forward and backwards in time, presenting us with the narrator’s early ignorance and the understanding he attained later on in life. One of the best examples of this appears in vol. 4, Sodom and Gomorrah, when Marcel describes a covert relationship between two men:

What I did not alas know at that time, and only learned more than two years later, was that one of the chauffeur’s customers was […], and that [the chauffeur]…had struck up a close friendship with [the customer]…(while making out he did not know him in front of company)…Had I known this at the time…perhaps many of the sorrows of my life in Paris, the following year, many of my misfortunes relative to Albertine, might have been avoided; but I had not the least suspicion of it.

Here, Proust has superimposed 3 different moments in time into a single sentence:

• Point A, the present moment, where Proust is not aware of the relationship between the chauffeur and his customer, and has not experienced any “misfortunes relative to Albertine”;

• Point B, the “following year,” when those misfortunes occur;

• Point C, “more than two years later,” when Proust becomes aware of the chauffeur’s relationship with his customer, which could have made a material difference to his romantic life.

The novel is full of these enticing, elliptical sentences—where Proust reveals something, and expresses that, if only he had known this earlier, certain events would have proceeded differently, or with greater understanding. They create a tremendous feeling of tension—they urge you onwards, so you can know exactly what these future misfortunes are. Sentences like these are, I’d like to think, what Lydia Davis meant when she praised Proust’s economy with language.

And sentences like these are, I feel, where Proust is doing something more, something greater, than many conventional novels. I began to understand why writers that came after Proust revered him so much, and were able to take, from the pages of In Search of Lost Time, techniques that made their own work better.

It’s not pretentious to care about art!

And even if you’re not a writer, encountering Proust can still be a formative experience. By the end of vol. 1, I had attained an entirely new understanding of my childhood—my youthful fears, dreams, fascinations. By the end of vol. 2, I began to think about my early crushes differently—and all the aspirations for an adult life that I invested in them. As the novelist

Ottessa Moshfegh

once said to Bookforum, “A novel is a literary work of art meant to expand consciousness.” (In that sense, Proust may be more transformative than a psychedelic trip—though the most effective approach, perhaps, might be to combine the two.⁵)

There are, certainly, other novels about childhood and crushes and all the other concerns of Proust’s novel. But there aren’t that many that have offered the same revelatory impact—the same feeling of transformation—that In Search of Lost Time offered me. And this, I think, is at the heart of W. David Marx’s distinction between entertainment and art. Anyone who tries to categorize cultural artifacts in this way is usually accused of being elitist and pretentious—but it is useful, and arguably necessary, to draw these distinctions.

One easy way to distinguish true art from mere entertainment: How many years did the creator spend languishing in bed to produce it?

Because many of us know, instinctively, when something is just a book—conventional, safe, staid—and when something has greater artistic ambitions. The same goes for music, too. You don’t have to be a critic to realize this, although reading great criticism helps sharpen your instincts. As Marx writes, in the same newsletter:

The problem is that audiences are not so easily fooled, because they have internalized the entirety of artistic progress in the 20th century. They know when a song is just a jam and not a radical piece of transformative art.

What critics can do is help us see this—help us understand, viscerally and deeply, when something is merely pleasant (entertainment) and when it attains that rare, necessary, vital originality that defines art.

But doing so doesn’t mean that a critic is, strictly speaking, always engaged in criticizing what falls short. One of my favorite models for this is the late Peter Schjeldahl, the art critic for the Village Voice and then for the New Yorker.

I wrote about the thrill of reading Peter Schjeldahl’s art criticism in—

how to write about art

What Schjeldahl specialized in was writing about art with such obvious affection, with such intense enthusiasm and intimacy, that you felt welcomed into his way of seeing. He criticized—of course. He drew distinctions and he stood by his judgments, as critics must do. But he never forgot the importance of explaining how he arrived at his judgments—he never said that you had to like a certain artist because they were an Important Artist who had produced Important Works.

Instead, Schjeldahl wrote about why he liked that artist—with such devotion and energy that you began to feel the same way, too. As the critic Zachary Fine wrote in The Nation,

The signal difference between Schjeldahl and the hard-nosers is that he doted on his audience. He saw himself as belonging to a generation of critics who didn’t think that “somebody should have to crawl over broken glass to get to art.” He wasn’t a popularizer, exactly—he balked at the idea that he was dumbing down art history for the general reader—but he nonetheless felt that his readers dictated the terms of his writing. The function of criticism, for him, wasn’t to prescribe or proscribe; it was to “connect.” To seduce and please, rather than épater la bourgeoisie…While criticism, for Baudelaire, was necessarily “partial, passionate, political,” for Schjeldahl, it was—above all—pleasurable. Art, he claimed, was “about 100 percent” pleasure.

To defenders of pop culture, being “pretentious” is a dead end. Defenders of high culture, fear the charge of the word “popular.” Schjeldahl—who was firmly on the high culture side—deftly avoided both snares. He wanted everyone to love the art he did. But he refused to demean the complexity of the art or the capacities of his audience. As

Henry Begler

writes,

People talk about making the museum more accessible and cleansing art of the stain of pretension. How would they do that—more wall texts? Coloring activities for adults? No! You have to do what Schjeldahl did and communicate the experience of looking at paintings. To make people understand why you might invest your time in these experiences…You have to describe the blooming, buzzing experience of coming into awareness with art and why it might be desirable, more desirable and fulfilling than things that are easier. And the people who want to chase that feeling will do so and the people who are content to stick to Netflix, well, their loss.

Taste is more like love than education

What I needed, as a young reader, was for someone to tell me: These are the books that have the capacity to change you—to reprogram your phenomenological and philosophical approach to living—to transform you.

I wrote about transformative experiences, especially when it comes to sexuality and identity, in—

how to change your life, part 1: l.a. paul's transformative experience

But it wouldn’t have helped, I think, to have someone tell me what to read in a moralizing, didactic way. As a child, I steered clear of any book recommendation that suggested something was good because it was “important,” “serious,” “necessary.” As an adult, I’m skeptical of anyone who attempts to defend the value of literature by arguing that it will inculcate the correct ethical or political viewpoints; that it has obvious professional or economic value; that it’s “good for you.”

Literature can be all of those things (although, at its best, it offers not indoctrination, but an imperative to take your intellect and your ideals seriously)…but I don’t think these arguments work unless you’re already committed to literature. Falling in love with a book, like falling in love with a person, doesn’t really conform to reason. The heart goes first; the head follows.

We choose to devote our time to certain books not just for the inherent, artistic qualities they have—qualities which, in many cases, we only appreciate after reading them—but because of the people who advocate for those books. I realized this after listening to an episode of Tasteland, a podcast by Daisy Alioto, the CEO of Dirt Media, and Francis Zierer, the editor of Creator Spotlight. (I am resolutely anti-podcast, except for Tasteland and a handful of other favorites.) About ten minutes in, Alioto says to their guest that:

There’s something you get at about why we pay attention to certain things and collect them…that is different than a cynical and algorithmic view of taste…Our desire and attention falls to certain things because of the way that we feel about the person, place or thing that introduces them to us. In that way, taste is a lot more similar to love than it is to education.

Their guest is Charles Broskoski, the co-founder and CEO of Are.na, and the first part of the podcast is devoted to an essay he wrote about “all of the important reference points (like books, artworks, people, etc) that have changed who I am (or maybe helped me become who I am).”

I wrote about Are.na and how it facilitates intellectual discovery, sociability, and depth in—

research as leisure activity

Broskoski describes these as “nodal points.” A nodal point, he writes, can be “any ‘thing’ in the world that has changed your trajectory…[including] a person…a friend, or a place, or just an idea.”

Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is one of my nodal points (and it was probably a nodal point for Virginia Woolf, too.) But my friend Ari—a poet, linguist and perfumer—is also a nodal point. Because I admired them so deeply, I became interested in the things they were interested in, and sought out information about scents and perfumes and an olfactory landscape that had, previously, been obscured to me. I educated myself in the world they inhabited. But the education came after; the love came first.

My friend Nat (the first person I sent this newsletter to!) is another nodal point. Whenever we spoke—in exuberant, looping conversations about everything from software, Solenoid, fashion and film—I felt more activated, more alive, by her passion for things. It was the way she spoke about films, in particular—her devotion to Yasujirō Ozu and Abbas Kiarostami and others—that made me want to watch them too. Before we became friends, I don’t think I watched more than 5 films a year—it just didn’t seem like my thing. My friendship with Nat—and my admiration for her film criticism—turned it into my thing.

All this culminated in my “film bro summer” last year, which you can read about here—

everything i read in june 2024

Here for the right reasons

Without these friendships, I don’t think my relationships to perfume and film would have been the same. It was the friendship, the devotion to the Other, that made me educate myself in these areas. (Similarly, my relationship to literature is founded on my parasocial relationship to Lydia Davis.)

It wouldn’t have worked, I think, to try and “get into” perfume or film or literature simply because it worked. I would have been, as the title of Broskoski’s essay suggests, “Here for the Wrong Reasons.”

“Earlier this year,” Broskoski writes,

I was in a mode where I was feeling particularly annoyed at a certain type of person online. The easiest way to describe this type of person is someone whose interests are more strategic than personally intuitive. A person whose interests accumulate with an awareness of how they will reflect back onto them. A person who follows nodal points not from an innate desire, but from the expectation of some kind of reward, social or otherwise.

Or to put it in different terms, a person who is here for fame and not for love.

Much has been said about how social media shapes our tastes for the worse, but Broskoski is interested in other environmental factors. “Algorithms pervert one’s attention,” Broskoski notes, but “an atmosphere that promotes being performative does as well.”

One can read Proust for performative reasons, of course. But I don’t know if that sustains someone through 3,000 pages of prose. It may get you through the first 50 pages, but to keep on going, some part of you has to be attending to the novel itself, not what the novel can do for you—not the feeling of being able to say, “I’m reading Proust,” but the feeling of actually reading Proust.

This is how love works—you may begin for pure reasons, or egocentric and performative reasons, but in the end it has to be earnest. Our lives are short. We should read what we love and spend time with those we love. And if the world is full of writers who can model a kind of “reverse poptimism,” an unfeigned enthusiasm for the greatest works—then, I think, we’ll have the best possible chance of being transformed by art.

---

Three recent favorites

Life lessons from ‘80s French comedies ✦✧ What Werner Herzog and Nicholas Nassim Taleb have in common ✦✧ “Spring running wild” and colliding into poetry

Life lessons from ‘80s French comedies ✦

I’ve been texting this image, from the French romantic comedy La Boum 2, to everyone I know. It perfectly expresses how I approach life, especially in the transition from winter (seasonal depression season) to spring (when a relentless, uncompromising optimism reigns).

From Claude Pinoteau’s La Boum 2 (1982), via the digitised-celluloid tumblr

What Werner Herzog and Nicholas Nassim Taleb have in common ✦

This approach reminds me of a strategy that Nicholas Nassim Taleb (the derivatives trader and entertainingly polemical essayist) advocates for in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.

A “barbell strategy,” Taleb writes, is one that involves “a combination of extremes kept separate, with avoidance of the middle.” Applied to reading, this means:

Trashy gossip magazines and classics or sophisticated works; never middlebrow stuff.

Read Proust, or read The Cut’s sublimely voyeuristic sex diaries; nothing in between. (You probably shouldn’t be reading my newsletter, if you take Taleb’s advice seriously.)

The filmmaker Werner Herzog has a similar approach, as he explained in an interview with The Guardian:

Herzog reads voraciously; he says that all the good directors do. It doesn’t even have to be great literature. His friend, the documentary maker Errom Morris, recently recommended that he read a real piece of crap. “It was a bad book…And it’s a wonderful book to read because you have to comb the content against the texture and it gives you fabulous insights into human nature. It is the same with trash movies, trash TV…[like] The Kardashians. I’m fascinated by it. So I don’t say read Tolstoy and nothing else. Read everything. See everything. The poet must not avert his eyes.”

“Spring running wild” and colliding into poetry ✦

I loved this poem from Ruth Krauss’s There’s a little ambiguity over there among the bluebells. There’s so much spontaneity and immediacy to it! Spring running wild…comes upon the poet running wild…they collide.

designingwriting

A post shared by @designingwriting

Krauss was best-known for her children’s books, which were “formally strange” and “redefined children’s literature,” as Adrienne Raphel wrote in the New Yorker. She also mentored the illustrator Maurice Sendak, who—after working with Krauss on several books—wrote and illustrated the bestselling Where the Wild Things Are.

But There’s a little ambiguity over there among the bluebells was one of her rare works for adults. The collection was published by Something Else Press, which was founded by the Fluxus artist Dick Higgins. (Higgins also published books by Gertrude Stein and the avant-garde composer John Cage.)

I wrote about my fascination with Fluxus, and what I think contemporary AI artists can learn from the movement, in—

good artists copy, ai artists ____

An image from my life enters your screen

It’s spring in London—well, nearly summer:

I have exerted myself relentlessly trying to come up with a pun that references In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, but I am simply not capable of it!

Thank you for reading and for letting me write to you about In Search of Lost Time—a novel that has (genuinely) changed my life. I’d love to hear about your own relatiotnship to Proust (antagonistic? affectionate?) and about the books that have inspired a similar passion in you!

And a special thank you to my fellow Proust fans from when I lived in San Francisco, especially

daniel bashir

, who runs the excellent and intellectually rich podcast

The Gradient

. It is not entirely correct to call it an “AI podcast”—one of the best episodes is Daniel’s interview with Thomas Mullaney, a professor of Chinese history, on Mullaney’s book The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age.

1. All quotes are from the Penguin translation of In Search of Lost Time, edited by Christopher Prendergast, and with a different translator for each volume. (The first volume is translated by Lydia Davis.)

I actually compared Davis’s translation with the Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright translation—the one that comes in a beautiful box set—here, and I personally think Davis’s is more beautiful! But please weigh in if you have strong opinions on the best English translation of Proust!

2. One of the loveliest discoveries I had, when reading In Search of Lost Time, was seeing how engaged Proust was with the science of his time, and the literary potential he saw in it! Several of his elaborately developed metaphors rely on concepts from biology or optics.

3. It’s worth noting that my dad, in true Eastern Bloc style, had read many of the great Russian writers—and the French ones—as a child. He was always on my case about reading vulgar YA trash instead of the really great novels: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and—well, this one is Irish—Ethel Voynich’s The Gadfly, which was immensely popular behind the Iron Curtain.

I am endlessly delighted by the fact that Ethel Voynich was the youngest daughter of George Boole, the mathematician behind Boolean algebra, which was foundational in the development of computer programming.

And one of my favorite novels, Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid (which I love so much, and mention so frequently, that my phone autocorrects “cartarescu” to include the little Romanian diacritics), actually includes Ethel Voynich and George Boole’s relationship as a key part of the plot!

4. I mean, it’s obviously useful—if you are trying to befriend literary people—to have a working knowledge of Proust. But I’ve been in many, many more conversations where a working knowledge of, say, Game of Thrones or the last Arsenal game or Kate Middleton’s social media could have helped me ingratiate myself with people.

And also, if I were to be very crass and direct about this: It is usually at my workplace, surrounded by other tech workers, that I have to pretend to be interested in TV shows. At a poetry reading, where the average annual income is—most likely—much, much lower…that’s when I talk to people about Proust! In the US, high culture is not really associated with high incomes—that’s something that seems to be omitted from a lot of conversations about cultural elitism and who the actual economic elites are.

5. Reply to this email and I’ll tell you my favorite Proust passage to read before (a) a psychedelic trip in nature, and (b) going to a gay/queer rave.