"And before Swann had had time to understand what was happening, to think: 'It is the little phrase from Vinteuil's sonata. I mustn't listen!', all his memories of the days when Odette had been in love with him, which had had succeeded , up till that evening, in keeping invisible in the depths of his being, deceived by this sudden reflection of a season of love, whose sun, they supposed, had dawned again, had awakened from their slumber, had taken wing and risen to sing maddeningly in his ears, without pity for his present desolation, the forgotten strains of happiness.
In place of the abstract expression 'the time when I was happy', 'the time when I was loved', which he had often used until then, and without much suffering, for his intelligence had not embodied in them anything of the past save fictitious extracts which preserved none of the reality, he now recovered everything that had fixed unalterably the peculiar, volatile essence of that lost happiness; he could see it all; the snowy, curled petals of the chrysanthemum which had had tossed after him into his carriage, which he had kept pressed to his lips - the address 'Maison Doree', embossed on the note-paper on which he had read 'My hands trembles so as I write to you', the frowning contraction of her eyebrows when she said pleadingly: 'You won't let me be very long before you send for me?'' he could smell the heated iron of the barber whom he used to have in to singe his hair while Loredan went to fetch the little working girl; could feel the torrents of rain which fell so often that spring, the ice-cold homeward drive in his victoria, by moonlight; all the network of mental habits, of seasonable impressions, of sensory reactions, which had extended over a series of weeks its uniform meshes, by which his body now found itself inextricably held. At that time he had been satisfying a sexual curiosity to know what were the pleasures of those people who lived for love alone. He had supposed that he could stop there, that he could not be obliged to learn their sorrows also; how small a thing the actual charm of Odette was now in comparison with that formidable terror which extended it like a cloudy halo all around her, that enormous anguish of not knowing at every hour of the day and night what she had been doing, of not possessing her wholly, at all times and in all places! Alas, he recalled the accents in which she had exclaimed: 'But I can see you at any time; I am always free!' - she, who was never free now . . ."
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 363-364
So many thoughts as I read these words. I guess the first would be the least serious or profound, and that is that I'm going to have to change my tag line from My Year With Proust to My YEARS With Proust. We've blown into March and I'm still writing on Swann's Way, with six more volumes waiting patiently for me (although, as I said, I'm reading ahead in Within a Budding Grove. However, that's perfectly OK. If the worst thing I'm facing on this project is reading Proust longer than I anticipated then I'm living a pretty charmed existence. The process of reading, making notes, and then revisiting those notes, reconsidering the passage, and then writing on it, while time consuming is accomplishing exactly what I had hoped - it's allowing me to immerse myself in Proust and truly think and reflect on his words. Plus, one of my goals was to slow down - to linger before the hawthorns - so I can't turn around and complain about pacing.
I love the dichotomy here between love and sex that Proust references. "At that time he had been satisfying a sexual curiosity to know what were the pleasures of those people who lived for love alone. He had supposed that he could stop there, that he could not be obliged to learn their sorrows . . ." Yes, you never know the extent of that delirious nightmare until it happens to you. One minute you're listening to your friends going on and on about their stupid, pointless love life and wondering why they just can't start thinking logically - and the next your head is on the bar because that song came on the jukebox.
There are those spaces, the ones that we consciously keep sacred and safe and the ones that we unconsciously don't know that we're preserving, that the ones we've loved continue to inhabit. In the past we would have kept love letters or actual pictures hidden away, even if we were with someone else, and even if we were happily with someone else. Now we hide digital files under misleading file names or email exchanges or texts floating around in cyberspace. However, we also unconsciously, and certainly unwillingly, do the same thing and keep the memories of a former lover, which are much more tangible and a hell of a lot more painful than the conscious artifacts.
As Dwight Yoakum reminds us in The Heart That You Own, "I pay rent on a run-down place. There ain't no view but there's lots of space in my heart, the heart that you own." Yes, I just made a Dwight Yoakum reference. While I loathe pop country, I have to admit that I have a certain soft spot for authenticity and I think Yoakum is the real deal - and, well, it fit the flow of the conversation.
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