Tuesday, August 16, 2016

My Year With Proust - Day 229

"'At this moment,' Robert's friends would say to him, seeking to invalidate by their malicious words a disinterested action on Rachel's part, 'at this moment she will be in the promenade at the Folies-Bergere.  She's an enigma, that Rachel, a regular sphinx.' In any case, how many mercenary women, women who are kept by men, does one not see setting countless little limits to the generosity of their lovers out of a delicacy that flowers in the midst of that sordid existence!
   Robert was ignorant of almost all the infidelities of his mistress, and tormented himself over what were mere nothings compared with the real life of Rachel, a life which began every day only after he had left her.  He was ignorant of almost all these infidelities.  One could have told him of them without shaking his confidence in Rachel.  For it is a charming law of nature, which manifests itself in the heart of the most complex social organisms, that we live in perfect ignorance of those we love.  On the one hand the lover says to himself: 'She is an angel, she will never give herself to me, I may as well die - and yet she loves me; she loves me so much that perhaps . . . but no, it can never possibly happen.' And in the exaltation of his desire, in the anguish of his expectation, what jewels he flings at the feet of this woman, how he runs to borrow money to save her from financial worries!  meanwhile, on the other side of the glass screen, through which these conversations will no more carry than those which visitors exchange in front of an aquarium in a zoo, the public are saying: 'You don't know her?  You can count yourself lucky - she has robbed, in fact ruined, I don't know how many men.  She's a common swindler.  And crafty isn't the word!' And perhaps this last epithet is not absolutely wrong, for even the sceptical man who is not really in love with the woman but merely physically attracted says to his friends: 'No, no, my dear fellow, she's not at all a whore.  I don't say she hasn't had an adventure or two in her time, but she's not a woman one pays, she'd be a damned sight too expensive if she was.  With her it's fifty thousand francs or nothing.' The fact of the matter is that he himself has spent fifty thousand francs for the privilege of having her once, but she (finding a willing accomplice in the man himself) has managed to persuade him that he is one of those who have had her for nothing.  Thus, in society, the most blatant, the most notorious creature will never be known to a certain other person save wrapped in a delicious cocoon of natural sweetness.  There were in Paris two thoroughly decent men whom Saint-Loup no longer greeted when he saw them and to whom he could not refer without a tremor in his voice, calling them exploiters of women: this was because they had both been ruined by Rachel."
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 291-292

"For it is a charming law of nature, which manifests itself in the heart of the most complex social organisms, that we live in perfect ignorance of those we love."

Proust continues to ruminate on Robert's fascination with Rachel, and in the larger sense on our fascination with all of our lovers.  How much time do we waste trying to figure out what our lovers are doing when we're not in our presence (which usually takes the form of driving down their street at odd times to discover what we claim to dread the most; which is probably the emotional equivalent of grinding your tongue into the space where you just had a tooth pulled).  This is probably some combination of insecurity and vanity and a solipsistic sense of the endless boundaries of our own self.  Now, the irony of this is that at the very same time we don't often recognize them as separate self-conscious beings.  It's not simply that we're fretting over the fact that they might be cheating on us - hell, they might actually be sitting on the couch wearing the t-shirt we accidentally left there while shopping for presents for us; rather, our greatest fear is that they might actually exist as a free-standing being.  I often tease my students by pointing out that the class is really only about me (well, OK, that part is true) and that they are actually just imaginary characters that I created to populate the classroom because it amused me.  This tends to work with first year students because they are easy to wind up.  However, at the beginning of any relationship we're really not that different, which is why we're so surprised to see that new lover out and about in town; our assumption is that they're sitting quietly and penitently on the other side of the door of their apartment, like one of those dogs from The Secret Life of Pets.  Now, having said all that, what we eventually figure out is that even when we're settled down with that person and they're sleeping in the same bed we still "live in perfect ignorance" of them, but that's another story.

No comments: