conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a story about Consolations, Philosophy, Art with the genre: Literature & Fiction, History & Criticism?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this story could be 'How Proust Can Change Your Life'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled How Proust Can Change Your Life about Sunday, Proust's, Telegraph with the genre: Literature & Fiction, History & Criticism.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: 'What a marvellous story this is...de the author dissects what [Proust] had to say about friendship, reading, looking carefully, paying attention taking your time, being alive and adds his own delicious commentary. The result is an intoxicating as it is wise, amusing as well as stimulating, and presented in so fresh a fashion as to be unique...I could not stop, and now much start all over again.' Brian Masters, Mail on Sunday 'De the author not only has a complete understanding of Proust's life...but what is particularly charming about this small, readable story is its tongue-in-cheek benignity, its lightly held erudition and its generous way of lending itself to what is not only the greatest story of the century but also the darkest and the most eccentric' Edmund White, Observer 'It contains more human interest and play of fancy than most fiction...de the author, in emphasizing Proust's healing, advisory aspects, does us the service of rereading him on our behalf, providing of that vast sacred lake a sweet and lucid distillation.' John Updike, New Yorker 'De the author's little story is so charming, amusing and sensible that it may even itself change your life.' Allan Massie, Daily Telegraph 'This engaging story is one of the most entertaining pieces of literary criticism I have read in a long while.' Sunday Telegraph 'A very enjoyable story' Sebastian Faulks
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: ' Sunday Telegraph 'A very enjoyable story' Sebastian Faulks...de the author dissects what [Proust] had to say about friendship, reading, looking carefully, paying attention taking your time, being alive and adds his own delicious commentary. The result is an intoxicating as it is wise, amusing as well as stimulating, and presented in so fresh a fashion as to be unique...I could not stop, and now much start all over again.' Brian Masters, Mail on Sunday 'De the author not only has a complete understanding of Proust's life...but what is particularly charming about this small, readable story is its tongue-in-cheek benignity, its lightly held erudition and its generous way of lending itself to what is not only the greatest story of the century but also the darkest and the most eccentric' Edmund White, Observer 'It contains more human interest and play of fancy than most fiction...de the author, in emphasizing Proust's healing, advisory aspects, does us the service of rereading him on our behalf, providing of that vast sacred lake a sweet and lucid distillation.' John Updike, New Yorker 'De the author's little story is so charming, amusing and sensible that it may even itself change your life.' Allan Massie, Daily Telegraph 'This engaging story is one of the most entertaining pieces of literary criticism I have read in a long while.'What a marvellous story this is.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first three paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: How Proust Can Change Your Life
  The frustration of the Roman beauty suggests that the poseur had violated a fundamental law of length stipulating the appropriate number of words in which an experience could be related. He had not written too much per se; he had digressed intolerably given the significance of the events under consideration. Falling asleep? Two words should cover it, four lines if the hero had indigestion or if a Labrador was giving birth in the courtyard below. But the poseur hadn't digressed simply about sleep; he had made the same error with dinner parties, seductions, jealousies.
  It explains the inspiration behind the "All-England Summarise Proust Competition," once hosted by Monty Python in a south coast seaside resort, a competition that required contestants to précis the seven volumes of Proust's work in fifteen seconds or less, and to deliver the results first in a swimsuit and then in evening dress. The first contestant was Harry Baggot from Luton, who hurriedly offered the following:
  But fifteen seconds did not allow for more. "A good attempt," declared the game-show host with dubious sincerity, "but unfortunately he chose a general appraisal of the work before getting on to specific details." The contestant was thanked for his attempt, commended on his swimming trunks, and shown off stage.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: However, imagine that the evening had unfolded more successfully, as successfully as could have been hoped:
  JOYCE: Please, appelez-moi James. Le Duc! What a close and excellent friend, the kindest man I have met from here to Limerick.
  However, the First World War radically altered his plans by delaying the publication of the succeeding volume by four years, during which time Proust discovered a host of new things he wanted to say, and realized that he would require a further four volumes to say it. The original five hundred thousand words expanded to more than a million and a quarter.
  It was not just the overall shape of the novel that changed. Each page, and a great many sentences, grew, or were altered in the passage from initial expression to printed form. As Proust went back over what he had written, he repeatedly saw the imperfections in his initial attempt. Words or parts of sentences were eliminated; points that he had judged complete seemed, as he went back over the text, to be crying out for recomposition, or elaboration and development with a new image or metaphor. Hence the mess of the manuscript pages, the result of a mind perpetually improving on its original utterances.
  Unfortunately for Proust's publishers, the revisions did not cease once he had sent his handwritten scrawls to be typed up. The publishers' proofs, in which the scrawl found itself turned into elegant uniform letters, only served to reveal yet more errors and omissions, which Proust would correct in illegible bubbles, expanding into every stretch of white space available until, at times, they overflowed into narrow paper flaps glued onto the edge of the sheet.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about Half.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: However, imagine that the evening had unfolded more successfully, as successfully as could have been hoped:
  JOYCE: Please, appelez-moi James. Le Duc! What a close and excellent friend, the kindest man I have met from here to Limerick. 
  However, the First World War radically altered his plans by delaying the publication of the succeeding volume by four years, during which time Proust discovered a host of new things he wanted to say, and realized that he would require a further four volumes to say it. The original five hundred thousand words expanded to more than a million and a quarter. 
  It was not just the overall shape of the novel that changed. Each page, and a great many sentences, grew, or were altered in the passage from initial expression to printed form. Half of the first volume was rewritten four times. As Proust went back over what he had written, he repeatedly saw the imperfections in his initial attempt. Words or parts of sentences were eliminated; points that he had judged complete seemed, as he went back over the text, to be crying out for recomposition, or elaboration and development with a new image or metaphor. Hence the mess of the manuscript pages, the result of a mind perpetually improving on its original utterances. 
  Unfortunately for Proust's publishers, the revisions did not cease once he had sent his handwritten scrawls to be typed up. The publishers' proofs, in which the scrawl found itself turned into elegant uniform letters, only served to reveal yet more errors and omissions, which Proust would correct in illegible bubbles, expanding into every stretch of white space available until, at times, they overflowed into narrow paper flaps glued onto the edge of the sheet.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last three paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Ironically, however, it is out of an idolatrous reverence for Proust, and a misunderstanding of his aesthetic ideas, that we speed blindly through the surrounding countryside, through neighboring nonliterary towns and villages like Brou, Bonneval, and Courville, on our way to the imagined delights of Proust's childhood locale. In so doing, we forget that had Proust's family settled in Courville, or his old aunt taken up residence in Bonneval, it would have been to these places that we would have driven, just as unfairly. Our pilgrimage is idolatrous because it privileges the place Proust happened to grow up in rather than his manner of considering it, an oversight that the corpulent Michelin man encourages because he fails to recognize that the worth of sights is dependent more on the quality of one's vision than on the object viewed, that there is nothing inherently three-star about a town Proust grew up in or inherently no-star about an Elf petrol station near Courville where Proust never had a chance to fill his Renault—but where if he had, he might easily have found something to appreciate, for it has a delightful forecourt with daffodils planted in a neat border and an old-fashioned pump that, from a distance, looks like a stout man leaning against a fence wearing a pair of burgundy dungarees.
  To forget this may sadden us unduly. When we feel that interest is so dependent on the exact locations where certain great artists found it, a thousand landscapes and areas of experience will be deprived of possible interest, for Monet only looked at a few stretches of the earth, and Proust's novel, though long, could not capture more than a fraction of human experience. Rather than learn the general lesson of art's attentiveness, we might seek instead the mere objects of its gaze, and would then be unable to do justice to parts of the world that artists had not considered. As Proustian idolaters, we would have little time for desserts that Proust never tasted, for dresses he never described, for nuances of love he didn't cover and cities he didn't visit, suffering instead from an awareness of a gap between our existence and the realm of artistic truth and interest.
  The moral? That there is no greater homage we could pay to Proust than to pass the same verdict on him as he passed on Ruskin—namely, that for all its qualities, his work must eventually also prove silly, maniacal, constraining, false and ridiculous to those who spend too long on it.