My Year With Proust - Day 53

"In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her. And so, at an age when it would appear - since one seeks in love before everything else a subjective pleasure - that the taste for feminine beauty must play the larger part in its procreation, love may come into being, love of the most physical order, without any foundation in desire.  At this time of life a man has already been wounded more than once by the darts of love; it no longer evolves by itself, obeying its own incomprehensible and fatal laws, before his passive and astonished heart.  We come to its aid; we falsify it by memory and by suggestion; recognizing one of its symptoms we recall and recreate the rest.  Since we possess its hymn, engraved on our hearts in its entirety, there is no need of any woman to repeat the opening lines, potent with the admiration which her beauty inspires, for us to remember all that follows.  And if she begin in the middle, where it sings of our existing, henceforward, for one another only, we are well enough attuned to that music to be able to take it up and follow our partner, without hesitation, at the first pause in her voice."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 208

Again, so many wonderful points that I'd like to pursue here, so I'll have to come back several times in the next couple days. This mean that I often publish posts before they are completely finished, which is poor scholarship, but I view it as an evolutionary process.  Plus, I promised myself that I was going to put out something every day (and how I'm going to do that in Zanzibar is anybody's guess) so I'm sort of keeping a promise to myself.

To start off with, for some reason this reminds me of the first woman I ever fell in love with, although I'm sure that I never told her that at the time, probably because I didn't possess the emotional intelligence and language to understand it or to express it.  Her name was Patty and she was the older sister of a friend of mine.  She was twenty-four and I was twenty, but she might as well have been thirty years older than me in regard to emotional (and just general) maturity.  Essentially, she was a woman and I was doing a clumsy and unconvincing impersonation of a man.  Still, she was kind and patient and lovely and sweet.  Come to think of it, she looked much like the dark European actresses with terrible secrets I always fall for, except that I don't think she had any terrible secrets (other than, at least then, a terrible choice in men).