My Year With Proust - Day 35

" . . . But very soon that love surged up again in me like a reaction by which my humiliated heart was endeavouring to rise to Gilberte's level, or to draw her down to its own.  I loved her; I was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult her, to do her some injury, to force her to keep some memory of me.  I knew her to be so beautiful that I should have liked to be able to retrace my steps so as to shake my fist at her and shout, 'I think you are hideous, grotesque; you are utterly disgusting!' However, I walked away, carrying with me, then and for ever afterwards, as the first illustration of a type of happiness rendered inaccessible to a little boy of my kind by certain laws of nature which it was impossible to transgress, the picture of a little girl with reddish hair, and a skin freckled with tiny pink marks, who held a trowel in her hand, and smiled as she directed towards me a long and subtle and inexpressive stare.  And already the charm with which her name, like a cloud of incense, had filled that archway in the pink hawthorn through which she and I had, together, heard its sound, was beginning to conquer, to cover, to embalm, to beautify everything with which it had any association."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 150-151

Why do we want the women we've loved to always remember us?  It's not as if we're particularly good at returning the favor.  To my shame, I have to admit that one time, years ago, my ex-wife was looking through our college alumni magazine, which had just arrived in the mail.  She was perusing through the news and notes section when she said, a little sadly, "Oh, _______ died."  There followed an uncomfortable pause, with her obviously waiting for me to say something, and me trying, unsuccessfully, to read her inscrutable mind. In exasperation she said, "You slept with her.  In the treasurer's office at the fraternity house.  During the party after . . ."  She had, and I'm sure still has, an extraordinary memory, and I'm sure that's what impressed/amazed/horrified me at that moment in time.  Later, however, I felt ashamed, not because _______ and I had been together - or that it signified some infidelity on my part - but because I had forgotten her, at least temporarily.  I did remember her - and do remember her, even today - fondly, but at that moment, in the chaos of every day life, I forgotten about the entire event.  To me, that seemed an act of infidelity, made especially worse when I heard of her untimely passing.  Don't we owe something to all the people we've been with, even if it's only memory?