My Year With Proust - Day 195

   "This was precisely what Berma's acting showed me. This was indeed what was meant by nobility, by intelligence of diction.  Now I could appreciate the merits of a broad, poetical, powerful interpretation, or rather it was to this that those epithets were conventionally applied, but only as we give the names of Marx, Venus, Saturn to planets which have nothing mythological about them.  We feel in one world, we think, we give names to things in another; between the two we can establish a certain correspondence, but not bridge the gap.  It was to some extent this gap, this fault, that I had to cross when, that afternoon on which I first went to see Berma, having strained my ears to catch every word, I had found some difficulty in correlating my ideas of 'nobility of interpretation,' of 'originality,' and had boken out in applause only after a moment of blankness and as if my applause sprang not from my actual impression but was connected in some way with my preconceived ideas, with the pleasure I found in saying to myself: 'At least I am listening to Berm.' And the difference which exists between a person or a work of art that are markedly individual and the idea of beauty exists just as much between what they make us feel and the idea of love or of admiration.  Wherefore we fail to recognise them.  I had found no pleasure in listening to Berma (any more than, when I love her, in seeing Gilberte).  I had said to myself: 'Well, I don't admire her.' But meanwhile I was thinking only of mastering the secret of Berma's acting.  I was preoccupied with that alone, I was trying to open my mind as wide as possible to receive all that her acting contained.  I realised now that that was precisely what admiration meant."

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, p. 46

Proust continues to reflect on the difference between the two times that we saw Berma perform.  Proust suggests, "We feel in one world, we think, we give names to things in another; between the two we can establish a certain correspondence, but not bridge the gap."  I remember the first time I saw Neil Young in concert way back in the early 1980s when he was off in one of his bizarre experiments (he gets bored and has to tackle new challenges all the time to keep himself energized, and, by definition, some of them end badly).  Still, it was a good show, although I was not the right person to see it with.  My friends kept trying to talk to me during the show and I was dismissive if not outright mean to them.  I had never seen him before and I was focusing so hard on the performance that I think I probably ruined it for them, and probably for me as well.  I didn't see him again for over another thirty years.  Why?  Part of it relates to the fact that we were always broke, and I could never justify spending money on something I wanted when there were bills to pay.  However, I think I almost didn't want to see him.  He existed in my mind and my experience in the endless pristine hours that I spent alone listening to his albums and I couldn't get beyond that.  I couldn't bridge the gap that Proust is talking about.  When I saw him in concert I think I was focused on, again quoting Proust, my "nobility of interpretation," as compared to stepping back and enjoying the concert for what it was.  The Hindus and Buddhists talk about how the desire for Enlightenment, and thus the end of distracting passion, can be every bit as destructive a distracting passion as drugs or sex or greed.  When I saw him last summer I was in a very different place (not that I don't still have a boatload of distracting passions to drive me mad) and was more ready and able to step back and just soak it all in.  Now, Proust, as is his wont, takes this a step further by relating this phenomenon to those we love.  We can't bridge the gap between what we think and what we feel, and hence, in a way, we view our loved one as a performance that we're trying to judge, mainly unsuccessfully.  "And the difference which exists between a person or a work of art that are markedly individual and the idea of beauty exists just as much between what they make us feel and the idea of love or of admiration.  Wherefore we fail to recognise them."  Consequently, we're trying to decide whether they are fit for our admiration as compared to accepting our love for them and their love for us.