My Year With Proust - Day 187

   "Geographers or archaeologists may conduct us over Calypso's island, may excavate the Palace of Minos.  Only, Calypso becomes then a mere woman, Minos a mere king with no semblance of divinity.  Even the qualities and defects which history then teaches us to have been the attributes of those quite real personages often differ widely from those which we had ascribed to the fabulous beings who bore the same names as they.  Thus had there faded and vanished all the lovely oceanic mythology which I had composed in those first days.  But it is not altogether a matter of indifference that we do succeed, at any rate now and then, in spending our time in familiar intercourse with what we thought to be unattainable and longed to possess.  In out later dealings with people whom at first we found disagreeable here persists always, even amid the factitious pleasure which we have come at length to enjoy in their society, the lingering taint of the defects which they have succeeded in hiding. But, in relations such as I enjoyed with Albertine and her friends, the genuine pleasure which was there at the starts leaves that fragrance which no artifice can impart to hothouse fruits, to grapes that have not ripened in the sun.  The supernatural creatures which for a little time they had been to me still introduced, even without my being aware of it, a miraculous element into the most commonplace dealing I might have with them, or rather prevented such dealing from ever becoming in the least commonplace."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 1012-1013

I've always had this theory that all graduate school does, at least in the short term, is make you hate your own field.  By the time I earned my PhD from the University of Cincinnati I was sick of school, and had suffered through a pretty wretched experience with my adviser, that I didn't even go to a history conference for around three years.  I was just sick of history.  Part of it is just exhaustion, certainly, but I also believe that you reach this point because you strip away the mythology and see how it really works - and you're left somewhere between underwhelmed and horrified.  What's that line from Bismarck, "Laws are like sausage, it's better not to see them being made." I suspect that love follows the same general rule.  In this passage Proust is comparing getting to actually know the young women who made up the troop to geographers and archaeologists excavating Calupso's island or the Palace of Minos, acts that provided invaluable knowledge but also made mythological beings terribly, terribly human.  Proust reflected upon first seeing the girls, "My desire had sought so avidly to learn the meaning of eyes which now knew and smiled at me, but which, that first day, had crossed mine like rays from another universe. . ."  And then you realize that your lover can't get organized and acts like an utter lunatic at times, and you wish you could go back to your imagined relationship.  Something terrible does happen when you pull back the curtain and see who the Wizard of Oz actually is, but you're still better off knowing.  Hell, as much as Odysseus loved his time with Calypso he eventually leaves her for something more tangible (although he's probably not the best person to go to for dating advice).