Thursday, June 9, 2016

My Year With Proust - Day 168

"And it was touching but at the same time surprising to hear Elstir exclaim, and with a respectful gentleness, as if merely uttering the words moved him to tenderness and veneration: 'My beautiful Gabrielle!' Later on, when I had become familiar with Elstir's mythological paintings, Mme Elstir acquired beauty in my eyes also.  I understood then that to a certain ideal type illustrated by certain lines, certain arabesques which reappeared incessantly throughout his work, to a certain canon of art, he had attributed a character that was almost divine, since he had dedicated all his time, all the mental effort of which he was capable, in a word his whole life, to the task of distinguishing those lines as clearly and of reproducing them as faithfully as possible.  What such an ideal inspired in Elstir was indeed a cult so solemn, so exacting, that it never allowed him to be satisfied with what he had achieved; it was the most intimate part of himself; and so he had never been able to look at it with detachment, to extract emotion from it, until the day on which he encountered it, realised outside himself, in the body of a woman, the body of the woman who had in due course become Mme Elstir and in whom he had been able (as is possible only with something that is not oneself) to find it meritorious, moving, divine.  How restful, moreover, to be able to place his lips upon that ideal Beauty which hitherto he had been obliged so laboriously to extract from within himself, and which now, mysteriously incarnate, offered to him in a series of communions, filled with saving grace."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 909-910

I like this passage more and more every time I reread it.  Proust is in Elstir's workshop where he for the first time meets Mme Elstir, who apparently had passed from model to mistress to wife (I'm not certain about the mistress transitional stage; I'm reading between the lines).  Initially he's put off by her arrival, because it disrupts his viewing of the Miss Sacripant painting. Elstir, like a dutiful husband, had quickly hidden the painting so that it would not agitate Mme Elstir, although he assures Proust that "the young person in the bowler hat never played any part in my life."  It's been my experience that many men deny that there are even women at their workplaces in a clumsy attempt to either limit their wife's jealousy or hide their own guilty thoughts.

At first Proust is not impressed with Mme Elstir.  "I found her most tedious; she might have been beautiful at twenty, driving an ox in the Roman Campagna, but her dark hair was streak with grey and she was common without being simple, because she believed that a pompous manner and a majestic post were required by her statuesque beauty, which, however, advance age had robbed of all its charm."  Later, however, he discovers her beauty by seeing her through Elstir's eyes in his earlier paintings.  What you discover - or at least what I consider to be the truth - is that he loved her not only before she became his wife (or his mistress) but before she ever became his model.  I know we've talked about this before, but is this really what love at first sight is?  It's not that we inexplicably fall in love with someone we've never seen before, but that the person we've always been in love with has finally shown up.  I mean, isn't this essentially what Plato said, and, well, he was a lot smarter than the rest of us.  Proust assures us that for Elstir, it was the "most intimate part of himself; and so he had never been able to look at it with detachment, to extract emotion from it, until the day on which he countered it, realised outside himself, in the body of a woman. . ."  Or, maybe it's not the love of a woman that we mistake for love at first sight, but rather love of the best part of ourselves, that this woman embodies, that we've never understood or reconciled until that moment? For Elstir, obviously far luckier than the average person, it might have meant self-love, but more importantly it meant self-knowledge and self-attainment.  "How restful, moreover, to be able to place his lips upon that ideal Beauty which hitherto he had been obliged so laboriously to extract from within himself, and which now, mysteriously incarnate, offered to him in a series of communions, filled with saving grace."

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