My Year With Proust - Day 80

   "This day, which I had begun with so many misgivings, waas, as it happened, one of the few on which I was not unduly wretched.

   For, although I no longer thought, now, of anything save not to let a single day pass without seeing Gilberte (so much so that once, when my grandmother had not come home by dinner-time, I could not resist the instinctive reflection that, if she had been run over in the street and killed, I should not for some time be allowed to play in the Champs-Elysees; when one is in love one has no love left for anyone), yet those moments which I spent in her company, for which I had waited with so much impatience all night and morning, for which I had quivered with excitement, to which I would have sacrificed everything else in the world, were by no means happy moments; well did I know it, for they were the only moments in my life on which I concentrated a scrupulous, undistracted attention, and yet I could not discover in them one atom of pleasure.  All the time that I was away from Gilberte, I wanted to see her, because, having incessantly sought to form a mental picture of her, I was unable, in the end, to do so, and did not know exactly to what my love corresponded.  Besides, she had never yet told me that she loved me."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 419-420

Proust's love for Swann's daughter Gilberte now forms a lovely parallel to Swann's own love for Odette, and it's shaping up to be just as desperate and unhappy.  As Proust tells us, "when one is in love one has no love left for anyone."  His story about his early realization that if his grandmother were run down in the street he would not be able to get away to see Gilberte reminds me of George Willard's initial anger with his mother for dying on the same day that he had a date, as laid out in the short story "Death" from Winesburg, Ohio, which I just had my students read a couple weeks ago.  No wonder we're so insufferable when we're in love.  I do find it interesting that one of the reasons why he was so desperate to get away to see Gilberte because he was already beginning to forget what she looked like, which once again reminds me of a story from Winesburg, Ohio, this time the story of long-suffering Alice in "Adventure."  In the end we always end up falling in love with a mytholgized version of the other person anyway, so maybe the reason why we forget their faces so quickly is that we never actually saw them at all.