“Desire makes all things flourish,” Proust wrote at the age of 18, “Possession withers them.” The ways our objects of desire sustain us is by failing to satisfy us. It was an insight from which he never recovered.

What he thinks he wants, after so much longing and hoping and imagining, invariably dismays him. Obsessed with wanting to know about people, he eventually came to “the world of people we associate with bears little resemblance to the way we imagine it.” Knowing these people — knowing anyone — ended in catastrophic disappointment. The sociability he craved, like most of what he craved, wearied him.

Only anticipation is satisfying.

To satisfy a wish can only ever end in disillusion. Because the real pleasure is in the desiring, in the imagining. “We should actually work as hard as we can not to get what we think we want. We do this automatically, it seems, but we need to put our minds to it, because the one belief we appear to be unable to give up on is the belief in the importance of satisfaction.” We cant think what else to do with our wishes other than try to satisfy them. This for Proust, is our fundamental flaw.

His faith in involuntary memory is really a faith in naivety, in never knowing beforehand what is going to matter to you, or why. If the real pleasures are unexpected pleasures, and what you want most is to be surprised, then you are likely to be skeptical about making a deliberate effort to achieve anything.

You have to find something you really want to do and find ways of not doing it. You have to find someone you really want in order to get over wanting them.

We only want to possess people in order to kill our desire for them because it is so painful. Wherever we love we suffer, and wherever we suffer we prefer not to — unless we can make our suffering our pleasure, often our best bet.