My Years With Proust - Day 441

The first time I had sung it, I was beginning to fall in love with Albertine, but I imagined that I would never get to know her.  Later, in Paris, it was when I ceased to love her and some days after I had enjoyed her for the first time.  Now it was when I loved her again and was on the point of going out to dinner with her, to the great regret of the manager who believed that I would end up living at la Raspeliere altogether and deserting his hotel, and assured me that he had heard that fever was prevalent in that neighbourhood, due to the marshes of the Bec and their "stagning" water.  I was delighted by the multiplicity in which I saw my life thus spread over three planes; and besides, when one becomes for an instant one's former self, that is to say different from what one has been for some time past, one's sensibility, being no longer dulled by habit, receives from the slightest stimulus vivid impressions which make everything has preceded them faded into insignificance, impressions to which, because of their intensity, we attach ourselves with the momentary enthusiasm of a drunkard. 

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1068-1069

Marcel finds himself humming a tune and suddenly, in a moment reminiscent, although certainly not as powerful, as the famous petite madeleine scene, a series of memories come flooding back relating to other times he had sung that tune.  He remembers when he was first in love with her - and when he had ceased loving her but had just had sex with her for the first time - and now when he was in love with her again.  He reflects, I was delighted by the multiplicity in which I saw my life thus spread over three planes . . ."  In Concepts of the Self the students are always amazed/confused by Linden's proposal that through a clumsy, incomplete evolutionary process we really have three brains living existing in cramped quarters in our head, like three bad roommates that don't communicate very well.  In much the same way, I would argue that we have every person we have ever been living inside of us right now.  It's not like those earlier versions ever truly disappeared, they just faded into the background.  The passionate lover and the sincere atheist and the morally ambivalent womanizer and the repentant proto-saint are still here, hanging out, like the bored angels killing time in the library in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire.  Unlike the angels, however, our vestigial selves have the opportunity to live again, as much as we would like to rein in some of them.  Think of how you never stop being a father, but how that nature sits within you, sometimes for months on end when you aren't in contact with your son, and then he suddenly comes out when you see or talk to him.  Granted, no other self is as powerfully constructed, but why shouldn't they be existing still within each of us?