self help reading + music

from How Proust Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton:

We might also let ourselves out of the zoo. What is considered normal for a person to feel in any place at any point is liable to be an abbreviated version of what is in fact normal, so that the experience of fictional characters afford us a hugely expanded picture of human behavior, and thereby a confirmation of the essential normality of thoughts or feelings unmentioned in our immediate environment. After we have childishly picked a fight with a lover who had looked distracted throughout dinner, there is a relief in hearing Proust’s narrator admit to us that “as soon as I found Albertine not being nice to me, instead of telling her I was sad, I became nasty,” and revealing that “I never expressed a desire to break up with her except when I was unable to do without her,” after which our own romantic antics might seem less like those of a perverse platypus.

etta james – you can leave your hat on