"I had arrived at a state of almost complete indifference to Gilberte, when, two years later, I went with my grandmother to Balbec. When I succumbed to the attraction of a new face, when it was with the help of some other girl that I hoped to discover the Gothic cathedrals, the palaces and gardens of Italy, I said to myself sadly that this love of ours, in so far as it is a love for one particular creature, is not perhaps a very real thing, since, if the association of pleasant or painful trains of thought can attach it for a time to a woman to the extent of making us believe that it has been inspired by her in a necessary sequence of events to cause, yet when we detach ourselves, deliberately or unconsciously, from those associations, this love, as though it were in fact spontaneous and sprang from ourselves alone, will revive in order to bestow itself on another woman. At the time, however, of my departure for Balbec, and during the earliest part of my stay there, my indifference was still only intermittent. Often, our life being so careless of chronology, interpolating so many anachronisms into the sequence of our days, I found myself living in those - far older days than yesterday or last week - when I still loved Gilberte. And then no longer seeing her became suddenly painful, as it would have been at that time. The self that had loved her, which another self had already entirely supplanted, would reappear, stimulated far more often by a trivial than by an important event."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 691
We've now entered the second, and final, long section from Within a Budding Grove, "Place-Names: The Place." Proust, typically and thankfully, devotes a lot of time to reflecting upon his visits to Balbec, a fictionalized version of the town of Cabourg, which is located on the English Channel and was Proust's favorite vacation spot. He claims to be almost entirely over Gilberte, and to have "succumbed to the attraction of a new face," which causes him to saddened both by the passing of their love but also by the reappearance of her memory. " . . . I said to myself sadly that this love of ours, in so far as it is a love for one particular creature, is not perhaps a very real thing . . ." I guess one way to think about it, which is within at least walking distance of the truth, is to ask how that original love could have been real when we've fallen in love with someone new; although if you go back to our earlier discussions on whether or not all loves are just reflected self-love, then it would be perfectly logical because your love for yourself is constant and you're just seeing it mirrored in new partners. Proust writes, "Often, our life being so careless of chronology, interpolating so many anachronisms into the sequence of our days, I found myself living in those - far older days than yesterday or last week - when I still loved Gilberte." Here I both agree and disagree with Proust. Life is undoubtedly full of anachronisms, and in fact is so dominated by them that they almost don't count as anachronisms any more. That said, I don't know if love is ever anachronistic, because is feeling a tinge of emotion or desire for someone you loved truly an aberration? My argument would be that if you truly loved someone you will always love them, so that it is really inaccurate to say that you "loved" someone. Maybe you just love them less or you're with someone that you love more or, at the very least, you have, through greater experience and context, learned to deal with the pain and can live without them. I think I still love every woman I ever loved, including some I never actually got around to telling. How could I not? If someone was so central to your being that you were ready to devote the rest (or a goodly chunk) of your life to them - or at the very least sleep next to them while there are sharp knives in the house - how can you not, at least on some level, still be in love with them?
No comments:
Post a Comment