"I fancy Mme de Villeparisis is not absolutely . . . moral," said the Princesse de Parme, who knew that the best people did not visit the Duchess's aunt, and, from what the Duchess herself had just been saying, that one might speak freely about her. But, Mme de Guermantes not seeming to approve of this criticism, she hastened to add: "Though, of course, intelligence carried to that degree excuses everything."
"You take the same view of my aunt as everyone else," replied the Duchess, "which is, on the whole, quite mistaken. It's just what Meme was saying to me only yesterday." (She blushed, her eyes clouding with a memory unknown to me. I conjectured that M. de Charlus had asked her to cancel my invitation, as he had sent Robert to ask me not to go to her house. I had the impression that the blush - equally incomprehensible to me - which had tinged the Duke's cheeks when he made some reference to his brother could not be attributed to the same cause.) "My poor aunt - she will always have the reputation of being a lady of the old school, of sparkling wit and uncontrolled passions. And really there's no more middle-class, solemn, drab, commonplace mind in Paris. She will go down as a patron of the arts, which means to say that she was once the mistress of a great painter, though he was never able to make her understand what a picture was; and as for her private life, so far from being a depraved woman, she was so much made for marriage, so conjugal from her cradle that, not having succeeded in keeping a husband, who incidentally was a scoundrel, she has never had a love affair which she hasn't taken just as seriously ass if it were holy matrimony, with the same irritations, the same quarrels, the same fidelity. Mind you, those relationships are often the most sincere; on the whole there are more inconsolable lovers than husbands."
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 525-526
Proust records the Duchess discussing her scandalous aunt, who wasn't really that scandalous at all. I've written before that while all of us occasionally feel misunderstood there is almost a religious faith, complete with saints, a functioning curate, and a central theology, based on a misrepresentation of who I am and what I believe. To be fair, it's not as if I haven't played a role in its construction.
When I was a senior in college there was a very popular rumor that a very lovely young woman was carrying my child and that I was using heroin, although I don't remember if the two legends were somehow related in the retelling. What made it especially odd was that the young woman and I had never had sex, and had never even come within walking distance of having sex. Few people are as generally hopeless with the opposite sex as I am. In regards to my heroin addiction, once again, total baloney. Few people are as passionately anti-drug as I am, and since I've never even smoked pot the chance of me mainlining heroin are pretty slim. So why did people believe these foolish tales? Beyond the obvious advantages in using character assassination to make yourself seem like a better person - or just general boredom - who knows, although in this case I suppose the tale is useful as a mechanism for self-reflection. And by this I don't think that you should ever take to heart the hurtful and idiotic things that other people say. You don't encourage or validate or empower slut shaming (no matter how one defines slut). Rather, in this case, as a means of dissecting my own actions by reconsidering past actions - or, as the kids would say, dealing with my own shit - I'm interested in the role that I played in the formation of this story. Then, as now, I've never been a person who told sexual tales out of school, and I've certainly never claimed to have slept with someone I didn't. Part of my reason for this year (soon to be years) long reading and commentary on Proust has been to provide a structured environment to reflect upon my own memory, my own search for lost time. And in doing so I'm always amazed at the limits of my own poor memory. To be fair, I've never stopped pushing myself and growing. As we discussed a couple weeks ago, I think I've lived a lifetime and a half since I turned fifty. Because of this I'm constantly making new fresh memories - and not re-enforcing old ones. My first year students, both in Linden's The Accidental Mind and Hock's Forty Studies That Changed Psychology, learn that when we recall a memory you're not downloading the original memory, but rather the last time you thought of it; and since memory storage is very flexible it's not the pristine original memory at all, but rather an edited file. All of this is by way of saying that my theory would be that since I'm always actively making new memories - and not simply reflecting upon the past - I'm never re-enforcing old memories, which is why it seems like I have a bad memory. Of course, I guess, that would also mean that when I do remember something from the distant past it's probably closer to the original memory because I've never accessed it before and thus potentially altered it by the emotional world that I lived in when I recalled the memory; essentially, that my memory of 1982 wouldn't have been altered previously by being running through the medium of 1995. If I'm recalling a memory from 1982 for the first time in 2016 would it be closer to the truth? That also implies that I've never actually recalled that memory before, when the reality is that I probably have thought of that memory before but simply forgotten it, but that wouldn't have kept me from altering it previously. As Linden reminds us throughout his book, perception and memory are stupid (not exactly his words). In regards to the drug rumor, I've always been pretty passionately anti-drug, although not necessarily in a judgmental fashion. What people do is what they do, but I've always drawn that line very clearly in my own life. I did have long hair and was usually unshaven (not that meant much for me when I was twenty-two) and unkempt (although clean) and thus maybe I looked like someone who would be using heroin, at least to the fellow white bourgeois Hoosier youths of Franklin College circa 1982. In regards to the young woman, god, who knows? I don't remember her name, and only vaguely remember her appearance - and I sort of remember having a mild crush on someone my senior year, but I may be weaving that false memory as I'm writing these words. Anyway, I guess this is a way of saying that I have some sympathy for the Duchess's aunt. I consider myself the most boring, dependable person in the world, but others have seldom thought so.
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