My Years With Proust - Day 442

But as just deaf-mutes detect, from a movement of air imperceptible to other people, that someone has approached behind them, so the Baron, to apprise him of people coldness towards him, had a veritable sensory hyper-acuity.  This, as it habitually does in every sphere, had engendered in M. de Charlus imaginary sufferings.  Like those neuropaths who, feeling a slight lowering of the temperature, and deducing therefrom that there must be a window open on the floor above, fly into a rage and start sneezing, M. de Charlus, if a person appeared preoccupied in his presence, concluded that somebody had repeated to that person a remark that he had made about him.  But there was no need even for the other person to have an absent-minded, or a sombre, or a smiling air; he would invent them.  On the other hand, cordiality easily concealed from him the slanders of which he had not heard.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 1072

As Cites of the Plain is drawing to a close I found myself reflecting on how thoroughly Proust's fascination with M. de Charlus has dominated this volume.  In this passage Proust is trying to help us understand how readily the Baron took offense to slights or, more correctly, perceived slights.  I'm thinking about my posting from a couple days ago in regards to difficult women I've been associated with (and I'm sure, quite correctly, that they would identify me as a difficult man, which may be redundant) who would have rivaled the Baron in their ability to search out perceived slights with extraordinary ease and proficiency.  For some reason I keep coming back to the chapter in Forty Studies That Changed Psychology on cognitive dissonance, that unconscious process where you change your actions or your words to alleviate the dissonance caused by the existence of two painfully contradictory concepts in your mind at the same time.  Can you have so much self-loathing that you only deal with it by placing that hatred in the minds of others?  I have a million flaws, but I generally don't care what others think about me, or at least I don't take great umbrage at their actual or perceived hatred or disdain for me (although that will certainly change as I grow older; I won't handle being politely ignored or pitied very gracefully).  I wonder if this all might be also relate to active/reactive.  I tend to be a very forceful personality (as my friends opine/lament, a force of nature), which puts people on the defensive and thus they are reacting.  If you are a more reactive personality are you osmotically allowing other people to take the leading role in determining your relationship, and thus you naturally are angered by their role in defining who you are?