"Perhaps it was to that hour of anguish that there must be attributed the importance which Odette had since assumed in his life. Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact."
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 250
Much of the latter part of Swann's Way is a lengthy discussion of the suffering of Swann at the hands of Odette, or at least the imagined suffering of Swann at the hands of Odette. As Marcus Aurelius reminds us, life is only what you deem it to be. Proust is such a beautiful writer, and his insights are so true, that it carries the day in a stretch that would be tedious, if not outright annoying, in the hands of a lesser writer. By this I guess I mean that you can't read it and at a certain point think, much like Cher in Moonstruck, snap out of it! However, when we're in that place we will talk endlessly of our misery, and we need to do so, although it is also a self-perpetuating phenomenon. I have a friend who is going through something similar right now and we've had many conversations about his frustration with a woman he is in love with and his very real pain - and I'm happy to listen because I've been in the same situation before, pouring my heart out for hours to friends (mainly my great friend Cinse, who would listen patiently and then have the good sense to say, essentially, "stop it, we're not going to talk about this any more, we're going to talk about something else," which is the appropriate answer). I suspect, even though the latter stages of this volume are beautifully written, I will probably end up including less of them. Although, when I go back and look at my notes, and read Proust's words again, it never seems to happen. Maybe that is one of his greatest talents, the ability to take what could (and probably should) be ordinary and make it extraordinary.
What I also find interesting about this little snippet of a section is the thought that we so willingly hand over to people the ability to make us miserable, and also, hopefully, blissfully happy. Are we really so lonely, so afraid of fading away unnoticed, that we will sign away everything? As I was saying to my friend yesterday, there is a difference between being utterly steadfast, essentially that guy who is always there through thick and thin, and giving away every aspect of our self, stripping ourselves bare - almost a form of self-flagellation - to be with that person. And in the process do we become something that the woman, and more importantly we ourselves, won't like in the long run. Do we run the very real risk of hating the person we love and also ourselves because of the level of emotional deprivation we've suffered? And yet we've done so voluntarily. I think my current relationship has a better chance of workout now (my own long-term Quixotic adventure) because at a certain point I stepped back and I think I started to give less, if that makes any sense; not that I'm not still that guy who is always there, but that I made a conscious, or maybe completely unconscious, unplanned and organic, decision to regain part of myself.
Finally, and this started out as a four line post and keep evolving (again, typical of my relationship with Proust), I love his description of the contact between you and the person you love. It becomes almost a tangible thing. In Freeland's Portraits & Persons she talks about icons and the notion that they were designed to connect you, not metaphorically but actually, to the divine; an almost physical link. In our desire for another form of transcendent love do we do the same thing with the woman we've fallen for? We almost feel them out their in the world. I'll need to think more about this, but now I need to get back to the Iliad and my other writing project. This is one of the reasons why I get up at 5:00, it's very quiet here in Bleak House and I find it a good time to write.
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