My Year With Proust - Day 129

   "But after a time, absence may prove efficacious.  The desire, the appetite for seeing us again may after all be reborn in the heart which at present contemns us.  Only, we must allow time.  But our demands as far as time is concerned are less no less exorbitant than those which the heart acquires in order to change.  For one thing, time is the very thing that we are least willing to allow, for our suffering is acute, and we are anxious to see it brought to an end.  And then, too, the time which the other heart will need in order to change, our own heart will have spent in changing itself also, so that when the goal which we had set ourselves becomes attainable it will have ceased to be our goal.  Besides, the very idea that it will be attainable, that there is no happiness that, when it has ceased to be a happiness for us, we cannot ultimately attain, contains an element, but only an element, of truth.  It falls to us when we have grown indifferent to it.  But the very fact of our indifference will have made us less exacting, and enables us in retrospect to feel convinced that it would have delighted us had it come at a time when perhaps it would have seemed to us miserable inadequate.  One is not very par particular, nor a very good judge, about things which no longer matter to us."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 676

This passage reminds me of that line from Memento where Leonard reflects, "How can I heal, how am I supposed to heal, if I can't feel time."  He can't get over his wife's death (if she ever died or actually existed, but that's another story) if he, because of his brain injury (if he even had one . . . I drive my first year students crazy when I make them watch this film and analyze it in a paper), lives his life in five minute increments and thus can't appreciate the passing of time.  It is the oldest of old chestnuts, but time does, almost universally, heal all wounds.  However, as Proust points out, "time is the very thing that we are least willing to allow, for our suffering is acute, and we are anxious to see it brought to an end."