My Year With Proust - Day 61

"This charm of drawing him closer to her, which her favourite plays and pictures and places possessed, struck him as being more mysterious than the intrinsic charm of more beautiful things and places, which appeared to him by their beauty, but without recalling her.  Besides, having allowed the intellectual beliefs of his youth to grow faint, until his skepticism, as a finished 'man of the world', had gradually penetrated them unawares, he held (or at least he had held for so long that he had fallen into the habit of saying) that the objects which we admire have no absolute value in themselves, that the whole thing is a matter of dates and castes, and consists in a series of fashions, the most vulgar of which are worth just as much as those which are regarded as the most refined."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 261-262

Here Proust is reflecting on how Swann continued to change himself to "fit" Odette, even down to altering his own aesthetics to match her own. This is one of those slippery slope aspects of a relationship.  On the one hand it is a good idea to take an active interest in what your partner likes, and that is a key part of constructing a relationship - and it's always great to be introduced to new ideas and activities.  I think every woman I was ever with left something of herself behind in the things she introduced into my life.  It might be a movie or a novel or a hobby, although it's often just a memory, which, truthfully, you're much more likely to retain than all the other more tangible objects. Now, I think this all becomes a problem when you sublimate your own interests to the new and improved and clearly better interests of your partner, in an effort to fit in - and thus stop being the person who she loved in the first place.

Having said that, what I find far more interesting in this section is Swann's belief that "the objects which we admire have no absolute value in themselves, that the whole thing is a matter of dates and castes, and consists in a series of fashions."  On the one hand, yes, it's true that these objects are very much a matter of often highly subjective perceptions.  I love the Chess Garden, but certainly part of the reason for that it is because it is associated in my mine and emotion with my friendship with my Sarah Cohen. However, I also think that some objects are transcendent, and here I make a very poor deconstructionalist.  My students, in an attempt at intellectual bravado, will claim that all that matters is the reader's (or in their case, the viewer's) perception of the work and not anything intrinsic in the work. As you might expect, I abuse them pretty thoroughly on this front. First off, I point out the obvious, and that is that this is a fun game to play if you're pissing on Shakespeare, but it would not be nearly as funny if people were saying that their (my students or my) work had no intrinsic value.  More importantly, I do think there are works of profound, and I would argue transcendent beauty, that are simply better.  There will never be a time until the ending of the world, to paraphrase Henry V, where people will not be reading Shakespeare or Dickens or Rumi or the Ramayana or, well, Proust, and I think this speaks to a greater intrinsic value.  So, in this case I think Swann is clearly posturing.  And, of course, this is the opinion of a clear and consistent intellectual snob (for which I'm at peace).