My Years With Proust - Day 467

. . . She gave me such pain by her withdrawal that, reaching after her, I caught her desperately by the arm.

   "Would it be physically possible," I asked her, "for yo to come and spend the night at Balbec?"

   "Physically, yes. But I'm dropping with sleep."

   "You'd be doing me an enormous favour . . ."

   "Very well, then, thought I don't in the least understand. Why didn't you tell me sooner?  I'll stay, though."

   My mother was asleep when, after engaging a room for Albertine on a different floor, I entered my own.  I sat down by the window, suppressing my sobs so that my mother, who was separated from me only by a thin partition, might not hear me. I had not even remembered to close the shutters, for at one moment, raising my eyes, I saw facing me in the sky that same faint glow as of a dying fire which one saw in the restaurant at Rivebelle in a study that Elstir had made of a sunset effect. I remembered the exaltation I had felt when, on the day of my first arrival at Balbec, I had seen from the railway this same image of an evening which preceded not the night but a new day.  But no day now would be new to me any more, would arouse in me the desire for an unknown happiness; it would only prolong my sufferings, until the point when I should no longer have the strength to endure them.  The truth of what Cottard had said to me in the casino at Incarville was now confirmed beyond a shadow of doubt.  What I had long dreaded, had vaguely suspected of Albertine, what my instinct deduced from her whole personality and my reason controlled by my desire had gradually made me repudiate, was true! Behind Albertine I no longer saw the blue mountains of the sea, but the room at Montjouvain where she was falling into the arms of Mlle Vineteuil with that laugh in which she gave utterance as it were to the strange sound of her pleasure.  For, with a girl as pretty as Albertine, was it possible that Mlle Vintenuil, having the desires she had, had not asked her to gratify them?  And the proof that Albertine had not been shocked by the request, but had consented, was that they had not quarrelled, that indeed their intimacy had steadily increased.  And that graceful movement with which Albertine had laid her chin upon Rosemonde's shoulder, gazed at her smilingly, and deposited a kiss upon her neck, that movement which had reminded me of Mlle Vinteuil but in interpreting which I had nevertheless hesitated to admit that an identical line traced by a gesture must of necessity be the result of an identical inclination, which knew whether Albertine might not quite simply have learned it from Mlle Vinteuil? Gradually, the lifeless sky took fire.  I who until then had never awakened without a smile at the humblest things, the bowl of coffee, the sound of the rain, the roar of the wind, felt that the day which in a moment was about to dawn, and all the days to come, would no longer bring me the hope of an unknown happiness, but only the prolongation of my agony. I still clung to life; but I knew that I had nothing now but bitterness to expect from it.  

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1154-1155

And suddenly a Morrissey album has broken loose in Cities of the Plain, although I suppose you could argue that all of Remembrance of Things Past is a foreshadowing of the Smiths. "I who until then had never awakened without a smile at the humblest things, the bowl of coffee, the sound of the rain, the roar of the wind, felt that the day which in a moment was about to dawn, and all the days to come, would no longer bring me the hope of an unknown happiness, but only the prolongation of my agony. I still clung to life; but I knew that I had nothing now but bitterness to expect from it." Proust sets this all up with a lovely running metaphor of the sky: "I saw facing me in the sky that same faint glow of a dying fire . . ." However, what's grabbed me at the moment is the epiphany that Marcel's reaction, and maybe all jealousy, is not a jealousy tied to a potential male or female lover, but rather a jealousy tied to life itself.  Are we driven crazy by the thought of our lovers in the arms of another actually a jealous rage based on their choice of a joy, a celebration of life, that we couldn't give them? Who they are with is absolutely beside the point.  They have chosen life and we have chosen death, whose embrace and bed are cold; and suddenly Omar Khayyam has shown up.