My Year With Proust - Day 123

"When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves.  It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other's feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 655

I can't decide whether this is a happy thought or a sad thought to inspire my 900th post; either way, I'm pretty sure it's a profound thought.  The notion of love itself as almost a tangible entity which reaches out to others is somewhere between beautiful and alarming.  It reminds me of the chapter on Contact from every Concept of the Self student's least favorite book, Freeland's Portraits & Persons (except for my students, oddly, who end up liking the book).  She discusses how icons are designed to not only honor the deceased, but to establish a true connection with them.  Granted, Proust is speaking more metaphorically here, but if he were correct then we are almost filling up the space between us and our loved ones, which would allow us to support our loved ones in an ethereal emotional gravitational field.  That's the positive, life-affirming way to look at it.  The other way to consider the question is that what we really appreciate and love about the other person is ourselves, since we're really just appreciating our own reflected feelings.  Again, Proust is speaking more metaphorically, although I suspect it works more realistically in this sense.  Cutting to the chase, I guess it would mean that all love is self-love, which makes sense if you consider that people tend to gush over what people have in common with them.  I always joked that my ex-wife married me for my Neil Young record collection, which, I guess, she ended up with after all (although, having to live with me for twenty-four years to acquire it is a steep price to pay). So, what we love about them is what we love about ourselves. To take it to the next level, think of the people who have no self-love and have therefore no love to send out to others, and thus no love can be reflected back.  It sounds a bit like the poster on a high school girl's bedroom, but, truthfully, I think that Proust is on to something here.  And, come to think of it, I think this is pretty life-affirming as well.

Either way, if you've reached 900 posts then clearly you have immense self-love. Or my complete lack of self-love.  At the very least it speaks to my extraordinary sense of self-fascination.

Thanks, as always, to the folks who have followed the blog, even an occasional quick glance, over the years.