Hindsight makes it easy to find in Marcel Proust’s essay On Reading (1905) the spark that would later flare into his multivolume novel, In Search of Lost Time (1913-27). However, his essay was not the intuition of solitary genius. Rather, it was published as a preface to the French translation of John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies (1865) – a cryptic title bringing together two lectures Ruskin delivered in Manchester in December 1864. Working on this text allowed Proust to realise why he deeply disagreed with an author he nevertheless admired: he resented Ruskin’s moralising defence of reading.

In his lectures, Ruskin bemoaned the general spiritual impoverishment of Victorian Britain, where every purpose has been ‘infected’ with ‘the idea that everything should “pay”’. The problem with this mindset, says Ruskin, is that it makes books superfluous – because genuine literacy is a training in disinterestedness, in generously reflecting on the meaning of chosen expressions. Provocatively, Ruskin describes his generation as illiterate – even in a time when education was expanding. He thought his contemporaries had lost any capacity for understanding each other or any important issue because they read superficially, and for the wrong reasons – chiefly, to get social recognition from a narrow group of peers. It was therefore, in his view, a matter of collective self-preservation to reverse course: to ‘organise, drill, maintain with pay, and good generalship, armies of thinkers, instead of armies of stabbers! …’

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Proust vigorously opposed this very idea. He found it preposterous to recommend reading as a valuable access point to a world of wisdom – akin to thinking you could access truth through ‘recommendation letters’. In response, his own defence of reading makes no concessions to the cost/benefit mindset, and owes nothing to financial or conversational analogies. In his view, it is futile to praise reading as an encounter with great minds. What happens in reading is substantially different from what happens in social life, where speech is always subject to social constraints. By contrast, a reader enjoys the utmost freedom to find the greatest writers boring, or to appreciate them for his own purposes, which may be utterly at odds with what they intended. Books do not create a higher form of conversation but instead allow for a unique ‘fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude’. Great writers do not reveal to us the admirable depth of their minds: they guide us in cultivating the ability to make sense of words, and things.