"Meanwhile Gilberte never came to the Champs-Elysses. And yet it was imperative that I should see her, for I could not so much as remember her face. The questing, anxious, exacting way that we have of looking at the person we love, our eagerness for the word which will give us or take from us the hope of an appointment for the morrow, and, until that word is uttered, our alternate if not simultaneous imaginings of joy and despair, all this makes our attention in the presence of the beloved too tremulous to be able to carry away a very clear impression of her. Perhaps, also, that activity of all the senses at once which yet endeavours to discover with the eyes alone what lies beyond them is over-indulgent to the myriad forms, to the different savours, to the movements of the living person whom as a rule, when we are not in love, we immobilise. Whereas the beloved model does not stay still; and our mental photographs of it are always blurred. I no longer really knew how Gilberte's features were composed, save in the heavenly moments when she unfolded them to me; I could remember nothing but her smile. . . . And I was not far from believing that, since I could not recall Gilbert's features, I had forgotten Gilberte herself, and no longer loved her."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 528
As we've seen, Proust's unsatisfying and painful love for Gilberte naturally, or maybe unnaturally, parallels that of her own parents, Swann and Odette. Here Proust is lamenting that Gilberte has stopped coming to the Champs-Elysses, which was, until later, as we'll eventually see, his only chance to see her. While pledging his love for her, he also has to admit that he is having trouble remembering what she looks like, and in failing to remember the specifics of her face he fears that he may forget that he loves her.
It reminds me of the long suffering Alice from the Sherwood Anderson Winesburg, Ohio short story "Adventure" who remains dedicated to her long-departed lover even though she can only vaguely remember him.
"During the early fall of her twenty-seventh year a passionate restlessness took possession of Alice. She could not bear to be in the company of the drug clerk, and when, in the evening, he came to walk with her she sent him away. Her mind became intensely active and when, weary from the long hours of standing behind the counter in the store, she could not sleep. With staring eyes she looked into the darkness. Her imagination, like a child awakened from long sleep. played about the room. Deep within her there was something that would not be cheated by phantasies and that demanded some definite answer from life.
Alice took a pillow into her arms and held it tightly against her breasts. Getting out of bed, she arranged a blanket so that in the darkness it looked like a form lying between the sheets and, kneeling besides the bed, she caressed it, whispering words over and over, like a refrain. 'Why doesn't something happen? Why am I left here alone?' she muttered. Although she sometimes thought of Ned Currie, she no longer depended on him. Her desire had grown vague. She did not want Ned Currie or any other man. She wanted to be loved, to have something answer the call that was growing louder and louder within her."
As my first year students learn in Concepts of the Self the mind can play profound games in perception. Nobody can understand how beautiful your beloved is because no one actually sees her the same way you do, and that's just the physical reality, let alone all the tricks of emotion and memory. However, I wonder if you can truly not see your beloved at all. A very good friend of mine is in the middle of a wretchedly pathetic failed love affair with a woman that we, his friends, all loathe. It's not simply that we hate that she treats him so shabbily, it's that we're just mystified by all of it. To paraphrase the old chestnut about Oakland, there's simply no there there. She's not smart nor kind nor funny nor attractive, and all of her attributes are remarkably negative (which I'll avoid detailing). However, he just moons over her endlessly, so much so that I truly think he doesn't see her - and not simply that his peculiar combination of sight and emotion and memory makes her appear more attractive to him than she is to us - but that he doesn't see her at all. He sees his own imaginary vision of her. He sees his overly romanticized concept of being part of a couple or how great it would be to have someone to come home to, without understanding that more often than not being part of a couple is somewhere between mundane and horrible or that there are few things worse than a Friday afternoon when you're dreading the thought of coming home to someone that you don't truly love. He sees the terrible specter of loneliness or of dying alone (like I said, he's got it bad) but he clearly doesn't see her.
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