"Because the letter has not - as the image of the loved one has - been contemplated by us in the melancholy calm of regret; we have read it, devoured it in the fearful anguish with which we were wrong by an unforeseen misfortune. Sorrows of this sort come to us in another way - from without - and it is by way of the most cruel suffering that they have penetrated to our hearts. The picture of the beloved in our minds which we believe t be old, original, authentic, has in reality been refashioned by us many times over. The cruel memory, on the other hand, is not contemporaneous with the restored picture, it is of another age, it is one of the rare witnesses to a monstrous past. But inasmuch as this past continues to exist, save in ourselves who have been pleased to substitute for it a miraculous golden age, a paradise in which all mankind shall be reconciled, those memories, those letters carry us back to reality, and cannot but make us feel, by the sudden pang they give us, what a long way we have been borne from that reality by the baseless hopes engendered by our daily expectation. Not that the said reality is bound always to remain the same, though that does indeed happen at times."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 675-676
In a previous post I talked about the amazing Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, Croatia. Briefly, I was in Zagreb and saw a sign for the museum and thought it would be a natural source of t-shirts to pester my sisters. It turned out to be an extraordinary experience and instantly become one of my all-time favorite museums (and that's saying something because I'm more than a bit of a museum whore). It was a bit of an uneven experience simply because I was there with a lovely woman and we were trying to determine whether we could continue our relationship after my time in the UAE was up (it was very complicated, as life always is at my age), so visiting the museum at that particular moment was either a remarkably bad good idea or a remarkably good bad idea. As it turns out we were together for another year so I can look back on the experience more favorably than if we had broken up then (this is what reading Proust does to you - dissecting memories down to the molecular level). Anyway, the museum is full of artifacts from actual broken relationships from very real people. In fact, anyone can contribute to the museum. Just go to the website and follow the link. As you might expect, some of the exhibits are funny and some of them are utterly heart-breaking. I ended up buying their museum book and use it in my COR 110 Concepts of the Self class.
Now, why did I bring up the Museum of Broken Relationships? Well, in a very real sense all of us are walking Museums of Broken Relationships, and this relates us back to the passage from Proust above. He is talking about "those particular memories, those cruel remarks, that hostile letter" that we have all received from someone we loved, although, to be fair, we only received one letter from Gilberte that would fall into that category. Over the weeks and months and years we have refashioned our overall memory of the beloved, but the cruel letter or remark has somehow not been refashioned or softened, and has remained the classic beetle in amber, although in this case a poisonous one. As Proust, writes "The cruel memory, on the other hand, is not contemporaneous with the restored picture, it is of another age, it is one of the rare witnesses to a monstrous past." The prose might be a bit florid (although, after all, this is Proust and it's one of the things we love about him), but, per usual, I think he's spot on. We've discussed the notion of why we carry around these memories, even the cruel ones, but at this moment I'm interested in the question of whether this cruel memory is, in fact, accurate. Yes, in the process of refashioning our memories of the beloved we've altered history, but maybe we've just added context; so in the great arc of our lives the refashioned memory is actually more representative and thus true than the raw, unfiltered events. If this is true, and it is an iffy proposition, then while that cruel letter or email or text might represent an accurate artifact of that moment, it doesn't necessarily represent the truth of the relationship. And yet we keep them. But here's the thing, if the artifact that represents the "cruel memory" is not true, even if it is accurate, then why do we suppose that the artifacts of happy memories are any more true? All of us, especially in today's age when we live online, have emails or pictures of our ex's buried in files within files on our laptops or in the cloud or even on ignored blogs. We approach them like sacred icons, purveyors of some essential immutable truth, when our current partner is being cold or when we're suffering from wanderlust. They must be true, right? Look at that smile. They, like the cruel memory, are the absolute truth and an absolute lie.
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