“The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.”  Proust, Swann’s Way

The meaningless trivia so common on social media, 24-7 news cycles, ubiquitous advertisements, texts and emails, and now the giant mushroom cloud of artificial intelligence amplifies Proust’s complaint (see the quote above). There is a legitimate fear, not just from the luddites, that modern technology leads to addiction, dissipation, confusion, apathy, and listlessness.

Ironically Proust pays the most exhaustive, granular attention to triviality in the history of the novel: the smell of a room, the precise angle of a girl’s hat, forty pages on not being able to fall asleep. His own method contradicts his complaint. The question isn’t whether trivia deserves our attention. It’s what attention does to trivia once given. The fault was never in the object. It was in the manner of attending to it. In recent blogs on Fog, Thoughts, and Rivers I’ve tried to focus on how the small, redeemed by attention, can provide in Proust’s words, something “of real importance.” Proust’s complaint isn’t against small things. It’s against small things treated cheaply, consumed and discarded on a schedule that never allows the return, the rereading, the slow second look that turns a triviality into deep observation.

The poet William Blake used the phrase “minute particulars” and it’s one of the keys to understanding his work.

“He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars.

General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.

For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.”

The minute particulars are the unique features of every person, the individual leaf rather than “nature” in general, one face rather than “humanity,” one act of kindness rather than abstract philanthropy, one line of poetry rather than generalized “beauty.”

Someone might claim to work for “the greater good” while crushing individuals in the process. Blake believed this happened constantly in politics, organized religion, and even philosophy.

Blake believed Christ himself represents the supreme “Minute Particular.” Jesus doesn’t merely preach universal love. He speaks with one Samaritan woman, heals one blind man, forgives one thief, and eats with one tax collector. Divine love is always personal.

A newspaper has to have something new every day, so it must treat the recurring and the minor as if each instance were a fresh emergency. Three or four books in a life change how you see; a newspaper asks you to be freshly concerned about something you’ll have forgotten by next week, and to do this every morning as a kind of civic duty.

Wizlawa Zymborska’s Nonrequired Reading takes the material Proust says forces us into “fresh triviality every day” and refuses to treat it as trivial. She treats every short piece as a minor book with the kind of patient, curious, morally alert attention Proust reserves for the three or four books of a lifetime.

She suggests the cheapness isn’t in the material, it’s in the reading. A poultry manual read carelessly is trivia; read the way she reads it, watching for what it reveals about human hope, vanity, or the taxonomy of small competencies, it becomes exactly the kind of attention that changes how you see. 

Where journalism as Proust describes it flattens the new into interchangeable urgency, Szymborska does the opposite. She takes the interchangeable and makes it singular again, by looking hard enough.

Francine Prose in Reading Like A Writer gives the process its method. Proust makes the complaint. Szymborska gives the counter-example. Prose reads a Chekhov paragraph the way Szymborska reads a beekeeping manual, as if nothing in it is beneath scrutiny.

What she adds is a how. Proust names the disease, the daily manufacture of false urgency and mourns the rarity of the cure. Szymborska performs the cure without explaining it. She just demonstrates, piece after piece, that attention transforms its object. Francine Prose is the one who breaks the cure down into technique: read for the sentence, not the plot; notice what’s cut; ask why the paragraph breaks where it breaks. She’s essentially saying that “deep” isn’t a mystical state you arrive at, it’s a set of specific questions you ask of a text that most readers, trained for speed and content, have stopped asking.

Put the three together and you get something like a sequence: Proust diagnoses the problem (triviality is structural, manufactured daily), Szymborska proves the solution exists (any object can be redeemed by the right attention), and Prose supplies the mechanics of that attention (here is literally how you look). It also quietly answers the worry buried in Proust’s line, that we’re stuck reading three or four important books versus infinite unimportant ones. Prose’s method makes rereading, even of a single paragraph, functionally infinite. 

When I was growing up we had a giant dictionary that sat on a book stand in the hallway. Whenever I needed help with a word-spelling, understanding, using-my mother’s answer was always the same: “Look it up.” Later, in college I had to key punch cards to submit to the computer lab. That was my lesson in “garbage in, garbage out.” Slow down, think it through, take care became my mantra. Gresham’s Law, bad money drives out good, applies to more than economics. Gresham’s Law explains Proust’s complaint.

I’m no Luddite. I use modern technology. I’m using it now. But, I’m also aware that sometimes less is more. You can’t believe everything you hear, see, or read, whether on social media or not. Trust but verify.

A recent article in The Atlantic by Rose Horowitch, The End Of Reading Is Here, presents the following facts: “Fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story … the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023 … Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.”

Yawn. We’ve heard this before, “the end of the world is nigh.” The idea has been around since the beginning of time. In fairness to Horowitch, she clearly states that decline is not automatic. She provides some humorous examples of crying wolf in the past.

One hundred twenty-six years ago, The Atlantic published an essay by Arthur Reed Kimball describing “one of the most serious of the unchallenged changes of modern American life.” The ability of the nation’s citizens to write well and think deeply was under attack. The enemy of eloquence and sustained attention? The newspaper. In “The Invasion of Journalism,” Kimball argued that the daily paper, with its sports pages and gossip columns, its miscellaneous items and slang, was eclipsing the book and the literary magazine. Even those who claim to read the newspaper to learn of pressing events in Washington or Europe, he argued, will turn first “to some interesting ‘story,’ perhaps a curious bicycle adventure, perhaps the capture of a clever burglar.”

Kimball wrote this around the same time Proust registered his complaint. One of America’s founders had the same concerns over two centuries ago.

Before the newspaper, the novel was seen as a threat to good reading habits and moral stature. Thomas Jefferson thought that one of the greatest obstacles to educating women was their passion for fiction, which seduced them away from “wholesome reading.” Once a woman has fallen for novels, he wrote, “nothing can engage attention unless dressed in all the figments of fancy.”

Horowitch goes on to point out that young people today yearn to be “influencers,” that is “social-media personalities.” While she was a reader of books in high school, “In the years since—I’m not quite sure when—the habit slipped. The change was subtle. I became busier. I started scrolling on my phone before bed instead of reading. My attention began to wander every few pages. What did it matter if I read less? No one was checking on my progress. And the books would always be there. I could pick them up later.” Yes, and maybe she did. Would we?

The fault has never been in the object. It has always been in the manner of attending to it. There are three ways small things can be redeemed by attention.

Importance and size are unrelated variables.

As Szymborska shows in Nonrequired Reading. She writes as if nothing is beneath scrutiny, as if something is there. In Thoughts I describe how background grasses do the structural work that showy wildflowers don’t: The fescues form the background of the meadow. They are not flashy, but they define its character. In the mind, they are like the habits, values, and memories that quietly sustain us. We seldom see them because they are always present. Dismissing the small assumes a discreteness that may not exist. Scale alone is not the right axis. Consider what’s going on underground. Trees in old-growth forests are frequently interconnected by mycorrhizal networks. They share nutrients and chemical signals. The appearance of separateness is partly an illusion. What looks like discrete individuals are notes in something more continuous.

Small things are often more accessible.

A rose, a fly, a sunflower, a lily, or the echoing green (all subjects in Blake poems) are available to anyone willing to look. In Fog, the joke underneath the piece is serious. The most ordinary possible subject turns out to have opinions about who has earned the right to use it well. Nothing about fog requires permission to access. All that is required is patience. Serious attention is available to anyone who stops looking past things.

Attention is what is required to transform small things into important things.

Nobody arrives able to read Proust’s “three or four books” without first practicing the skill on smaller things. Close reading is a teachable technique, not a mystical state attached only to sanctioned texts.

The watershed cosmology (fog → seep → rill → creek → river → ocean) shows how the great themes of love, justice, death, God, and so on are what everything drains into, a destination built entirely out of accumulated, unnoticed small things. (See Rivers, Streams, Creeks, Gullies, and Gulches.) Nothing large exists without the small tributary nobody thought to name.

I don’t mean to reject Proust’s “three or four books.” My argument is that they are not separable from the “trivia” he dismisses. The books themselves are downstream of exactly the kind of daily, minute, unglamorous attention he thought he was condemning.

On the other hand, I’m not defending the meaningless trivia I mention in my opening paragraph. My personal opinion is expressed in an earlier blog: Why I Cancelled Social Media. I simply don’t have the time to waste.

The point I hope I’ve made is that Proust is not simply right or wrong. His observation is complicated and deserves close attention. Close attention is a skill we need today more than ever.