My Years With Proust - Day 418

   "Out with it," Mme Cottard said to her husband encouragingly, "tell us about your odyssey."

   "Well, it really is rather out of the ordinary," said the doctor, and repeated his narrative from the beginning.  "When I saw that the train was in the station, I was dumbfounded.  It was all Ski's fault.  You're pretty eccentric with your information, my dear fellow!  And there was Brichot waiting for us at the station!"

   "I assumed," said the scholar, casting around him what he could still muster of a glance and smiling with his thin lips, "that if you had been detained at Graincourt, it would mean that you had encountered some peripatetic siren."

   "Will you hold your tongue!  What if my wife were to hear you?" said the Doctor.  "This wife of mine, is is jealous."

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 953

First off, as I get older I increasingly realize that most of life is about narrative, whether the conscious and unconscious construction of a narrative or the battle for control of the narrative.  Sadly, part of that relates to the construction of a false narrative, which is not quite the same as outright egregious lying (or maybe I'm just being easy on myself or have already been impacted by our post truth presidency).  Over the many decades before I became free of the carnal whirlwind I occasionally was involved with women who were almost stiflingly jealous.  A little jealousy is OK in that it shows the other person is paying attention and have not reached the point where they think that no other woman would desire you (because they themselves have stopped desiring you), and with some women a tiny sliver of jealousy is a wonderful aphrodisiac.  However, some women (and men obviously) can be so jealous that you spend half your time constructing a narrative that makes your environment and your co-workers and the presenters at the conference and the people at the gym and the people at the grocery store and people in the cars next to you at traffic jams as unpleasant, tedious, odious and, well, male as possible.

Secondly, if you have lived your life in such a fashion wherein you were not occasionally detained by a peripatetic siren you've lived your life very foolishly.