"The charm that he had been made to feel by certain evenings in the Bois, a charm of which Vinteuil's sonata served to remind him, he could not have recaptured by questioning Odette, although she, as well as the little phrase, had been his companion there. But Odette had been merely by his side, not (as the phrase had been) within him, and so had seen nothing - nor would have, had she been a thousand times as comprehending - of that vision which for none of us (or at least I was long under the impression that this role admitted of no exception) can be externalized."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 574-575
We've talked before about Vinteuil's sonata, and I think I included a link to it in a previous post (as I'm closing in, illogically, on nine hundred posts I guess we can be thankful that Labels were created). Here Proust is discussing what the sonata, and especially one little phrase, meant to Swann, who associated it with hearing it, and playing it in his mind, on many nights under the trees at a restaurant in Paris. "In place of the profound meaning that he had so often sought in it, what it now recalled to Swann were the leafy boughs, ordered, wreathed, painted round about it (which it gave him the desire to see again because it seemed to him to be their inner, their hidden self, as it were their soul), was the whole of one spring season which had had not been able to enjoy at the time, not having had - feverish and sad as he then was - the requisite physical and mental well-being, and which (as one puts by for an invalid the dainties that he has not been able to eat) it had kept for him." When Swann was first listening to the piece, imprinting it on his mind, he was in his miserable state during the lone painful months of his tortured love affair with Odette. In the end he replaced his analytical quest to understand the sonata's deeper meaning with an emotional memory, a wistfully elegiac desire to recapture a beautiful memory that was denied him, and thus maybe didn't even exist. He's lamenting the passing of a created memory.
Proust is also reflecting on the fact that Swann could not have reconstructed the memory even if he had talked to Odette about it, because she was there sometimes and they were not always miserable then. However, Odette was not there, at least no there as Swann was there. His perception of the evenings, colored by his emotion and memory, and for that matter differing physical perception, would have been dramatically different than hers. She would have seen the evenings in a different way, which means that she would have remembered the evenings in a very different way. It reminds me of one of my favorite lines from W. Somserset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence. "Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose language we know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house." Along with Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence were the first two adult books I ever read, again around fourteen or fifteen, and I can vividly remember reading this line and realizing that in a very real sense we would always be alone in the world - which was a pretty heady thought for a teenager, and which, while elevating my intellectual discourse, also promoted general teenage loneliness and self-absorption. Circling back to love, which is just beneath the surface in Remembrance of Things Past, and all of life I guess, maybe the key is to find someone whose perception of reality is the closest to yours.
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