My Year With Proust - Day 74

"'Life is indeed astonishing, and holds some fine surprises; it appears that vice is far more common than one has been led to believe.'"

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 385

Here Swann, in the midst of his Odette-centric misery, reflects on life. In some ways it is a throwaway line, but I still find it interesting.  First off, it shows that, as much as he's miserable, Swann is coming to terms with it, and is starting to view the situation with a little more perspective, which we need to get past these love affairs.  OK, but if that's true, then why does he end up with Odette in the end (spoiler alert)?  See, now you're delving into the mysteries of the human psyche, and you'd need someone much smarter than me (which would be essentially everyone) to answer that question.  That said, my theory is that when you end up with the person who caused you so much pain it somehow brings it all full circle and makes your actions logical. If you devote so much time and energy and emotional capital to someone you did not end up with in the end then it makes your suffering seem all the more foolish.  However, if you end up with that person, even if you probably shouldn't be with that person, it somehow validates all your actions.  This is why God, and psychologists, invented cognitive dissonance.

I'll also go ahead and add my spin on Proust's comment: "Life is indeed astonishing, and holds some fine surprises; it appears that virtue is far more common than one has been led to believe." When you reach a level of intellectual sophistication (or, in my case, pseudo-intellectual pseudo-sophistication) the default setting becomes that people are mainly amoral brutes and there is nothing to believe in. The problem is that I don't think I've ever believed that, even when I technically believed it, and I certainly don't believe it now.  I've been fortunate enough to travel to something like forty countries around the world and I've encountered such extraordinary kindness and support, even when I probably didn't deserve it.  My son has hitchhiked across the country a couple times and he tells these stories of people who went way out of their way to help him out, when they didn't know him from Adam.  My father has hiked the Appalachian Trail twice, and has a closet full of stories about people who helped him out along the way. When Sanford and I, on the Trip of Excellence, drove halfway across the country we met so many truly good people.  I can remember driving through North Vernon, Indiana and telling Sanford that I used to date a girl from that small town.  Sanford (who is also proof positive of the existence of truly good people in the world) decided that my dating history justified stopping at the post office there to mail postcards.  While there we talked to a really nice woman behind the counter who was amused/amazed by our quest.  As we were pulling out we saw her running out of the post office to flag us down, so we pulled over.  She ran after us solely to tell us about a restaurant where we should eat; she didn't want us to miss it.