My Year With Proust - Day 333

   Mme de Guermantes felt that she ought to reply to so direct a challenge on a point of fact which would enable her unobtrusively to confirm the tribute which she felt had come to an end.  In a shy and simple tone, and with an air all that more studied in that it sought to appear "heartfelt," she said with a meek reserve: "It's true, Basin is quite right."

   "But still, that wasn't quite the same thing as this.  After all, love is love, although in my opinion, it ought to confine itself within certain limits.  I could excuse a young fellow, a snotty-nosed youth, for letting himself be carried away by utopian ideas. But Swann, a man of intelligence, of proved refinement, a fine judge of pictures, an intimate friend of the Duc de Chartres, of Gilbert himself."

   The tone in which M. de Guermantes said this was, incidentally, quite inoffensive, without a trace of the vulgarity which he too often showed.  He spoke with a slightly indignant melancholy, but his whole manner exuded that gentle gravity which constitutes the broad and unctuous charm of certain portraits by Rembrandt, that of the Burgomaster Six, for example.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 704

The M. de Guermantes, a man of some reprobacy, sadly, and with some inherent dignity, declares, "After all, love is love, although in my opinion, it ought to confine itself within certain limits."  But, if love is love, does it possess any limits?  At the risk of this breaking out into a Shakespearean sonnet, I would propose no. As I've proposed in the past, it doesn't seem at all strange that you're still in love with an ex-love - and if you're no longer in love with her then you probably weren't in love with her in the first place.

Ah, let's bring in Shakespeare anyway.  I think the New Year can stand one more recital of his 116th Sonnet.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.  Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, thought rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor any man ever lov'd.