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It is often assumed, usually by people who don't have many friends, that friendship is a hallowed
sphere in which what we wish to talk about effortlessly coincides with others' interests. Proust, less
optimistic than this, recognized the likelihood of discrepancy, and concluded that he should always be
the one to ask questions and address himself to what was on your mind rather than risk boring you
with what was on his.
To do anything else would have been bad conversational manners: "There is a lack of tact in people
who in their conversation look not to please others, but to elucidate, egoistically, points that they are
interested in. " Conversation required an abdication of oneself in the name of pleasing companions:
"When we chat, it is no longer we who speak. ...[W]e are fashioning ourselves then in the likeness
of other people, and not of a self that differs from theirs."
The exaggerated scale of Proust's social politeness should not blind us to the degree of insincerity
every friendship demands, the ever-present requirement to deliver an affable but hollow word to a
friend who proudly shows us a volume of her poetry or her newborn baby. To call such politeness
hypocrisy is to neglect that we have lied in a local way not in order to conceal fundamentally
malevolent intentions, but rather, to confirm our feeling of affection, which might have been
doubted if there had been no gasping and praising, because of the unusual intensity of people's
attachment to their verse and children. There seems a gap between what others need to hear from us
in order to trust that we like them, and the extent of the negative thoughts we know we can feel
toward them and still like them. We know it is possible to think of someone as both dismal at poetry
and perceptive, both inclined to pomposity and charming, both suffering from halitosis and genial. But
the susceptibility of others means that the negative part of the equation can rarely be expressed
without jeopardizing the union. We usually believe gossip about ourselves to have been inspired by a
level of malice far greater (or more critical) than the malice we ourselves felt in relation to the last
person we gossiped about, a person whose habits we could mock without this in any way altering our
affection for them.
--Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life
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