大象传媒

Feeling excited at the prospect of Radio 4’s Proust Marathon – the new 10-hour dramatisation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time? Playwright Marcy Kahan – a lifelong Proustian – urges you to channel your inner Marcel by doing some active preparation.

Try to recall all the rooms in which you’ve ever slept, then narrow this down to your childhood bedroom. This is how the novel begins – with its middle-aged narrator, Marcel, trying to get to sleep.

Now it’s time to remember a moment in your life when a song, a taste, a smell, a texture suddenly summoned up a huge cascade of memory - recapturing an entire season in your life. Are you there yet? Congratulations. You and Marcel have embarked on the same enterprise.

There is no need to do this in French.

You must be keen to spend every waking and sleeping moment with the love-object. When your beloved is absent, you will torment yourself with what they might be doing and who they might be doing it with. Your need to control the beloved must be compulsive, tormenting and hugely time-consuming.

You will not be alone in your emotional and erotic obsession: in Proust’s novel the cosmopolitan Charles Swann is racked with jealousy over Odette, while young Marcel puts his life on hold as he tries to control Albertine.

You are allowed to eventually marry the love-object. Your marriage will astound your friends. This happens to one of the characters in the novel.

The room is buzzing with rich glamorous celebrities – all the high-status insiders you’ve ever wanted to meet. Chat to them. Drink with them. Eavesdrop. Observe their behaviour. Take copious notes. Are you perhaps dismayed at how banal, conceited, petty, even cruel these insiders reveal themselves to be?

This is Marcel’s experience with the aristocratic Guermantes family. He’s dreamed about their grandeur and nobility since childhood. But after gaining admission to their inner circle he finds himself both fascinated and repelled.

Rather than spending one minute each in front of 60 paintings, spend 60 minutes (okay. make it 12 minutes) in front of one painting. Anything by Giotto, Carpaccio or Vermeer might do the trick. Allow the precision and stillness of the painting to slow you down and see more precisely.

The young Narrator is devoted to painting and sculpture. He is also captivated by the natural world: a hawthorn bush, a grove of trees, the slant of sunlight on a white wall.

The Narrator reserves his admiration for creative practitioners: the writer Bergotte, the painter Elstir and the composer Vinteuil. Are you bored with love, social-climbing, art and nature study? Become involved in your own creative experiments.

This is what Proust did in his late thirties, after leading the life of a Paris socialite. Severely asthmatic and hyper-sensitive to noise, he lined his bedroom walls with cork, slept throughout the day and scribbled at night. His grand project was to "recapture time". He was still revising his seven-volume novel on the morning of his death, at the age of 51.

There is no need to read Proust at this stage – listen to it first: 大象传媒 Radio 4’s new 10-hour dramatisation of In Search of Lost Time.

Watch it: there are three art-house movies which dramatise different sections of the novel: Swann in Love [1984]; The Captive [2000]; Time Regained [1999].

Try the comic book: an ongoing series of hugely enjoyable graphic novels by Stephane Heuet.

7. Get out of bed

Now that you have partied, loved, had intense aesthetic experiences and sampled Proust in a variety of – it is finally time to read him. Search out the most congenial translations. Try him in French.

Resolve to read Proust - slowly - 20-minutes a day for the next couple of years.

Your new addiction will intrigue your friends: invite them to join you.

Immersion in Proust will distract you from pain, intensify your appreciation of people, art, nature - and enhance your own passage through Time.