Marcel Proustonce wroteabout a hypothetical sufferer of “spiritual depression.” Here’s a passage from it that resonates, in these days of forced interiority:

He has no real incapacity that prevents him from working, walking, eating, being out in the cold, but he finds it impossible to will the various acts he is otherwise perfectly able to perform…

如果你像我一样，把自己关在家里几个星期——而且足够幸运，没有遭受比上面描述的精神抑郁更严重的事情——那么你可能会在这种描述中认出自己。我发现陷入这种模式太容易了，至少在短时间内是这样。我认为这是一种太千篇一律的痛苦。当我与新事物失去联系，当我限制与他人的联系，限制我对外界的接触时，它就会涌上我的脑海。

It is also an affliction of mental action. Proust says that this sufferer is not physically unable to act. Instead, he is unable towill: to make a decision that will actually cause any bodily action. It is hismentalcapacities that languish, not his muscles or his organs.

As the philosophy of mental action has grown in recent years, interest in disorders of mental activity has grown alongside it. Serious pathology in mental action awareness has been used toexplaindelusionsofthought insertion. More local “will freezes” in the mind have been used toexplainthe weird, fragmentary content of our nightlydreams.

The disorder Proust describes here is not as extreme as schizophrenic delusions, and not as harmless as a muddled dream. It is meant to be something that we recognize, but not something we feel in our healthiest states. Those who experience it “live on the surface, in a perpetual forgetting of themselves, a kind of passivity which makes them the plaything of every pleasure and reduces them to the stature of those who surround them, jostling them this way and that.” This is how things are sometimes. It is not so good, but also not so bad.

This disorder may be particularly hard to avoid during state-mandated social distancing. But if we take Proust’s word for it, it is also one that can be cured—in fact, canonlybe cured—in a state that involves social distance. Of course, he would never put things so prosaically. “What is needed,” he actually wrote,

is an intervention that occurs deep within ourselves while coming from someone else, the impulse of another mind that we receive in the bosom of solitude… this is precisely the definition of reading and fits nothing but reading.

Proust made this point to directly contradict some claims made byJohn Ruskin他认为阅读就是与作者的对话。(The source essay for all this is an introduction Proust wrote for his own translation of Ruskin’sSesame and Lilies在法国)。普鲁斯特写道，阅读不仅仅是交谈。按照他的说法，在现实生活的交谈中，真正的诚实是不可能的，它会被我们自己的礼貌，我们对自己名誉的尊重，以及我们为他人做正确的事情的本来体面的冲动所破坏:“所有的礼貌，所有的在门厅里的问候，我们称之为尊重、感激和奉献，并在其中掺杂了许多谎言，这些都是徒劳和令人疲惫的。”阅读就更好了，它能给你提供他人思想活动的全部刺激，而不需要你为他人做任何事。只有在独处或“社交距离”中，你才能把别人的话纯粹地当作自己思考的动力，并为自己真实地思考，做出回应。As he put it:

Reading, unlike conversation, consists for each of us in receiving the communication of another thought while remaining alone, or in other words, while continuing to bring into play the mental powers we have in solitude and which conversation immediately puts to flight; while remaining open to inspiration, the soul still hard at its fruitful labours upon itself.

To put it less well, we might say that reading constitutes a weirdly in-between social activity. It’s not quite done in company, but it doesn’t quite leave you to your own thoughts.

This is precisely what’s meant to be curative about reading. When your thought patterns stultify—into ruminations about your cat’s disdain for you, or the perpetually undone dishes, or the uninspiring task of responding to a flood of emails—you need an impetus from outside to shake you out of this mental languor. Proust thinks of reading as not usurping your mental agency, but stimulating it. “Reading,” he said, “is merely a kind of instigation, which can in no way substitute for our personal activity; reading is happy simply to give us back the use of this ability.” For such a prolific reader, Proust knows that books aren’t things to ingest passively. They are jolts to your system, meant to spur you on to new and creative thoughts of your own. “An original mind knows how to subordinate reading to its own individual activity,” he said.

As a champion of reading, Proust is a good companion in these solitary times. If we take his word on this, he can only be such a good companion because he literally is not here with us. You can host him into your living room without politeness, civility, or deference. You can gobble up his words with the gluttony of a purely selfish consumer, hungry for a new adventure of thought that extends beyond the limits of your own four walls.

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