My Year With Proust - Day 21

"This was not to say, however, that she did not long, at times, for some even greater variation, that she did not pass through those abnormal hours in which ones thirsts for something different from what one has, when those people who, through lack of energy or imagination, are unable to generate any motive power in themselves, cry out, as the clock strikes or the postman knocks, in their eagerness for news (even if it be bad news), for some emotion (even that of grief); when, the heartstrings, which prosperity has silenced, like a harp laid by, yearn to be plucked and sounded again by some hand, even a brutal hand, even if it shall break them; when the wall, which has with some difficulty brought itself to subdue its impulse, to renounce its right to abandon itself to its own uncontrolled desires, and consequent sufferings, would fain cast its guiding reins into the hands of circumstances, coercive and, it may be, cruel."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 121

I knew when I launched this endeavor that at times it would be too personal and too painful, essentially too close, and this is definitely going to be one of those times. As painful as a breakup is, I would argue that the alternative, where you are in a somnambulistic state in an atrophying relationship, is probably worse. In the last years of my marriage I think I was in a place where I didn't care at all, and, again, that's not completely a condemnation of my wife, because, in the end, I allowed myself to reach that point.  And, truthfully, I could have been the chief culprit in getting there.  I think I have a real tendency to fade into the background, and then also, classically, wonder why no one seems to notice that I'm there.  Part of it, I suspect, relates to being raised to be that guy, the one doesn't need help, who is always there for everyone else; the one who would never admit to his own needs because that's a sign of weakness.  Or maybe I don't ever want to actually be in a relationship, although that's an unpleasant thought.  I've always favored that line from Scipio Africanus, "I'm never less lonely than when I am by myself." But that's the creation of a mythology in its own right - where we're all the character from Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Sea of Mist.    If I learned anything from the sad last years of my marriage and the horrible period of the separation and divorce is that I really do want and need someone.  I guess I never truly understood what loneliness was until that period in my life.  Of course, to reach that point where I understood what I really needed I also had to cause a lot of pain, and insure a lot of loneliness, for my ex-wife, who I've always loved and who, in a lot of ways, was my best friend.  The last several years of my marriage was marked by an almost perverse death watch, where I was dreadfully unhappy but also afraid to hurt my wife, where she in turn could justify me not leaving because she had freakishly high cholesterol and a family history of dying early.  It's almost as if we weren't changing anything because we were just waiting for her inevitable decline, and that's just so morbid and weird, but relationships tend to have their own internal logic (even if its ridiculously illogical).  So why didn't we fight, if we did love each other (which we did)?  Maybe we just both hated conflict so much that we couldn't face the emotional pain of essentially razing to the ground and rebuilding the edifice of our relationship after years of neglect.  Or maybe you can really love another person and somehow oddly not care if the relationship ends.  Certainly even after we separated neither of us made much of an effort to fix anything, and I was so destroyed by guilt that I would have come home for just about any half-hope.  Maybe we were just too proud, and were waiting for the other one to have the epiphany of their own failings and take responsibility for everything.  Of course, I think of every breakup I've ever had and none of them really make much sense.  Now, the big question, which I'll need to explore in more detail - and which will require more painful self-analysis - is whether or not now that I live in the tedium of the bourgeoisie of South Burlington that all of this will repeat itself.

My students really love this painting, which we study in Concepts of the Self, mainly  because, I suspect, it perfectly reflects that classic college age period of self-absorption.  As I always point out to my students, they're remarkably self-absorbed, although not particularly self-reflective.  Of course, what does it say about me when I'm still playing the same game in my 50s?