"No doubt this astonishment is to some extent due to the fact that the other person on such occasions presents some new facet; but so great is the multiformity of each individual, so abundant the wealth of lines of face and body, so few of which leave any trace, once we are no longer in the presence of the other person, on the arbitrary simplicity of our recollection, since the memory has selected some distinctive feature that had struck us, has isolated it, exaggerated it, making a woman who has appeared to us tall a sketch in which her figure is elongated out of all proportion, or of a woman who has seemed to be pink-cheeked and golden-haired a pure 'Harmony in pink and gold,' that the moment the woman is once again standing before us, all the other forgotten qualities which balance that one remembered feature at once assail us, in their confused complexity, diminishing her height, paling her cheeks, and substituting for what we came exclusively to seek other features which we remember having noticed the first time and fail to understand why we so little expected to find them again. We remembered, we anticipated a peacock, and we find a peony. And this inevitable astonishment is not the only one; for side by side with it comes another, born of the difference, not now between the stylisations of memory and the reality, but between the person whom we saw last time and the one who appears to us to-day from another angle, and shows us a new aspect. The human face is indeed, like the face of the God of some oriental theogony, a whole cluster of faces juxtaposed on different planes so that one does not see them all at once."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 977-978
So the reason why relationships fail is not that you become bored with that other person, but rather simply the clash between imagination and reality. There is really no real other person. Rather, there is only our perception of that other person, and since perception and memory are so inherently flawed and readily fungible the other person, and especially the memory of the other person, is what ever we consciously but probably unconsciously turn them into. The reason why absence makes the heart grow fond is that absence allows us to revel in the imagined version. "We remembered, we anticipated a peacock, and we find a peony." It's much harder for me to turn you into something that I desperately love and desire if you're right here with me.
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| "The human face is indeed, like the face of the God of some oriental theogony, a whole cluster of faces juxtaposed on different planes so that one does not see them all at once." Here is Picasso's Nude in an Armchair. So, do we take cubism to to have a philosophical and emotional side as well as a purely artistic one? |
I was walking through a Picasso exhibit in a museum overseas once (sorry to be so vague, but I've visited a lot of museums overseas, and they inevitably seem to be having Picasso exhibits; which brings us back to the chapter on museums in Freeland's But Is It Art?) and I had my first instinctual flash that maybe Picasso was a genius after all. The walls of the exhibit were filled with quotes from the painter and one of them essentially said (and, I'll have to call into question the accuracy of my own memory here - I can't critique the validity of memory in a general sense and recognize that it relates to me as well) that the reason why he sometimes paints eyes or hands disproportionally large is that it represents reality. If I fall in love with a woman because of her eyes then in my perception I actually see them larger. Reality is a tricky thing. I'm reflecting back on it because all of this is complicated by Proust's point about the multiplicity of images that make up a woman's (or anyone's) face. It's like the old joke about an actress wanting to be photographed in a way that showed off her "good side," which might not be my perception of her "good side," which might in turn be destroyed by rotating one centimeter too far.
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