"Remembering that I had not yet seen them on some particular day of the week, I assured myself that they would not becoming, that it was useless to wait any longer on the beach. And at that very moment I caught sight of them. And yet on another day which, in so far as it had been able to conjecture that there were laws that guided the return of those constellations, must, I had calculated, prove an auspicious day, they did not come. But to this primary uncertainty as to whether I should see them or not that day, there was added another, more disquieting; whether I should ever set eyes on them again, for I had no reason, after all, to know that they were not about to set sail for America, or return to Paris. This was enough to make me begin to love them. One can feel an attraction towards a particular person. But to release that fount of sorrow, that sense of the irreparable, those agonies which prepare the way for love, there must be - and this is perhaps, more than a person, the actual object which our passion seeks so anxiously to embrace - the risk of an impossibility. Thus already they were acting upon me, those influences which recur in the course of our successive love-affairs (which can moreover occur, but then rather in the life of big cities, in relation to working-girls of whose half-holidays we are uncertain and whom we are alarmed not to have seen at the factory exit), or which at least have recurred in the course of mine. Perhaps they are inseparable from love; perhaps everything that formed a distinctive feature of our first love comes to attach itself to those that follow, by virtue of recollection, suggestion, habit, and, through the successive periods of our life, gives to its different aspects a general character."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 890
At the end Proust makes the point, "Perhaps they are inseparable from love; perhaps everything that formed a distinctive feature of our first love comes to attach itself to those that follow, by virtue of recollection, suggestion, habit, and, through the successive periods of our life, gives to its different aspects a general character." One way to think about it is - are we so shaped, if not imprinted, by our first love that every one after that is either influenced by it or a series of copies of varying quality. When I talk about Marcus Aurelius in class, which, obviously, I do too much, I often come back to that classic Stoic notion that all you control in the world is this fleeting moment, and that too many people are either trapped by the past or frozen into immobility by the uncertainty and perceived terror of the future. Just as the lessons, good and bad, that you learn from your parents carry greater weight than all others, does the same thing apply to your first great love affair? We always assume that all of our earlier love affairs have a summative effect that makes us better partners for our current lover, although maybe we think that because it somehow validates all our earlier pain and stupidity. Instead, is your love life a version of Nietasche's theory of eternal recurrence?
However, the line that I find even more insightful is his proposal that, "One can feel an attraction towards a particular person. But to release that fount of sorrow, that sense of the irreparable, those agonies which prepare the way for love, there must be - and this is perhaps, more than a person, the actual object which our passion seeks so anxiously to embrace - the risk of an impossibility." Essentially, the most impossible the love the hotter the flame burns. But is it even more basic than that - until you reach the point where you perceive the chances of being together as impossible you can't fall in love. So, the old canard about how distance makes the heart grow fonder is based not on "missing" the person, but rather on the fact that impossibility has now reared its ugly head. From my own experience I think this is absolutely true. And then relationships fade later on when you're faced with the dreadful daily possible.
Oh, for some reason this discussion reminded me of the Jackson Browne song Fountain of Sorrow.
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