My Year With Proust - Day 72

   "Sometimes he hoped that she would die, painlessly, in some accident, she who was out of doors, in the streets, crossing busy thoroughfares, from morning to night.  And as she always returned safe and sound, he marvelled at the strength, at the suppleness of the human body, which as able continually to hold in check, to outwit all the perils that environed it (which to Swann seemed innumerable, since his own secret desire had strewn them in her path), and so allowed its occupant, the soul, to abandon itself, day after day, and almost with impunity, to its career of mendacity, to the pursuit of pleasure.  And Swann felt a very cordial sympathy with that Mohomet II whose portrait by Bellini he admired, who, on finding that he had fallen madly in love with one of his wives, stabbed her, in order, as his Venetian biographer artlessly relates, to recover his spiritual freedom.  Then he would be ashamed of thinking thus only of himself, and his own sufferings would seem to deserve no pity now that he him was disposing so cheaply of Odett's very life."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 373.

I've had this theory for years, which I've expounded upon at length, that any person who claims that they never looked at their wife or husband and saw, in an almost comical animated version, the amount of money in their insurance policy in a neat pile is a liar.  Obviously, I'm leaving the violent psychopaths out of the discussion here, and just talking about the normal boring Walter Mitty types who lead a very active imaginary counter-life.  And it's not necessarily cruelty as much as it is a desire to, as with Mohomet II, to regain your "spiritual freedom."  While we may still love that person, and that's definitely part of the equation, in the end it comes down to cowardice or the fear of crippling guilt.  In the end it's not even death you desire, but just the other person going away, and in a fashion that leaves you with the moral high ground. Now Swann, as with all of us, in the end feels ashamed of his desires and repents, sort of.  Maybe this is another beauty of Remembrance of Things Past; in addition to everything else, the characters are wonderfully, terribly human.