4,000 Pages: I Read The Longest Book In The World

My Gap Year of Proust, Daft Punk, and TikTok Brain Rot

I wanted a year of rest and relaxation. After four years at Penn, I was sick of optimizing every slot on my Google Calendar, calculating which events would produce the most capital – academic, professional, or social. I wanted the freedom to waste time and the luxury of not feeling guilty about it. That’s why I decided to take a gap year before grad school. I loved college, but I could feel the burn-out creeping in. I needed a circuit breaker.

When I went home – to find myself in Thailand, as one does – I asked myself what I had always wanted to do. If I had all the time in the world, what would I do?

Consume content. That’s what I had always done in between GCal blocks, using the spare 15 minutes to scroll through TikTok. But now, I had way more than 15 minutes. I had a whole day. And the next day. And the day after that.

After a week, my attention span was in shreds. PSA: if you ever find yourself fast-forwarding through 30-second videos on double speed, you might have a problem too. As chronically online as I’ve always been, my brain can only rot so much before it turns to sludge. Despite the best efforts of my algorithm, I was bored.

In the age of TikTok soundbites, I consider the act of listening through a whole album to be an exercise in delayed gratification. Not every track is going to be an earworm, but the whole album is greater than the sum of its songs. So I listened through Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, and I realized that I had to go back to go forward. During college (and even high school), I always sped through endless projects, without ever pausing to reflect on why I was doing them. Now that I had a spare year, I could collect these Fragments of Time and look Beyond my mental inertia.

I started reading In Search of Lost Time to force myself to slow down. I had seen the book mentioned in The Best Books on Memory and the Digital Age and Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s Intellectual Influences. I didn’t know anything about Marcel Proust, except that he wrote with “excruciating detail,” which I thought would provide the necessary self-flagellation for my attention span. The book is impossible to binge/skim/speed through: the sheer amount of sensory overload is a constant speedbump.

I was already two hours into the first volume (out of seven), wondering when the plot would finally begin, when I Googled it and saw that it was the longest book ever written. Depending on the size of the pages and the text, a copy of In Search of Lost Time can range from 3,000 to over 4,000 pages long.

I’ve never believed in quantifying literature. I don’t have a Goodreads account, and I have no idea how many books I read in a year. And I still stand by this. Because believe it or not, In Search of Lost Time is so, so much greater than 4,000 pages. It spans into whole universes, both within the text and within yourself.

If I had to tell you what the book is about, I would say: this French guy talks about his life, starting in the late nineteenth century and ending right after World War I. He wants to be a writer but can’t bring himself to actually work (this procrastination lasts for over 20 years), and he has severe attachment issues with the women in his life. I know this sounds like every early twentieth-century novel, but the plot isn’t the point. As cliché as it sounds, it’s in the journey, not the destination.

In Search of Lost Time is a stinging antiseptic for the soul. I can’t do justice to the precision of Proust’s insights about human nature – all I can say is that he forces you to confront the truths that you would rather ignore. How we project our own desires and fears on to others, how we assume that people will always conform to our fixed mental images. After finishing the book, I’d like to think that I’ve become a more patient person, and not just because I made it through the whole novel.

Through reading this book, I’ve learned to be less quick to judge and more willing to understand. Proust points a microscope towards each of his characters, turning them into case studies of humanity. As he writes,

“the particular and general lie side by side and it teaches us to pass from one to the other by a species of gymnastic which fortifies us against unhappiness by making us neglect its particular cause in order to gain a more profound understanding of its essence.” (Volume VII)

(Yeah, every sentence is written like this.) In short, human motivations are complex, and by delving deep into our own individual behaviors, we can find satisfaction in empathizing with others’ choices.

Proust also taught me a lot of other stuff, answering questions I didn’t even know I had. Why am I so eager to travel but often underwhelmed when I finally arrive at the places I want to see? Why is it so difficult to find happiness in the moment but so easy to be nostalgic for the hours that have just gone by? Why am I so attached to particular people/places/things?

As a student of politics and international relations, I found the socio-historical landscape of In Search of Lost Time surprisingly relevant to our present day. We see society undergoing significant technological change, experiencing stark political polarization, and facing large-scale international conflict. Some things never change: the convoluted nature of social climbing, the mechanics of seeing and being seen in the right crowd. Mass media is both manipulative and manipulated, leading public opinion on a tight leash. We get the sense that perhaps the center cannot hold because the center never was.

Above all, I’m now trying to imagine more space in my life. One of Proust’s main points is that in the space between ourselves and the external world, we create a reality which is entirely our own. Sometimes it feels like this space no longer exists – we live in a state of immediacy, “a hurry-hurry that compresses time into a tingling present.” Algorithms squash out the space for mediation: my TikTok feed reflects my personal data back to me, so I don’t have to put any effort into understanding what’s presented before my eyes. By ignoring space, we forget how to think outside our contexts, outside of ourselves. We live in an Instant Crush of noise.

As I move to China and start my master’s program next week, I’m hoping that I can take some of Proust’s wisdom into my new life. My gap year has been a space to breathe, read, and figure out what I need. By re-charging my academic and social batteries, I feel ready to approach my next step with the full attention and intentionality that it requires.

Oh, and I’d probably read this book again. But maybe in like 50 years. It’ll be a different book because by then, I’ll be a different person. That’s the beauty and terror of Time.

“things that we see on the horizon assume a mysterious grandeur and seem to us to be closing over a world which we shall not behold again; but meanwhile we are advancing and very soon it is we ourselves who are on the horizon for the generations that come after us; all the while the horizon retreats into the distance, and the world, which seemed to be finished, begins again.” (Volume VII)