Just as, long ago, when I was anxious to go to Balbec, what had urged me to set off was the longing for a Persian church, for a stormy sea at daybreak, so what was now rending my heart as I thought that Albertine might perhaps be going to Trieste, was that she would be spending Christmas night there with Mlle Vinteuil's friend: for the imagination, when it changes its nature and turns into sensibility, does not thereby acquire control of a larger number of simultaneous images. Had anyone told me that she was not at that moment either at Cherbourg or at Trieste, that there was no possibility of her seeing Albertine, how I should have wept for joy! How my whole life and its future would have been changed! And yet I knew quite well that this localisation of my jealousy was arbitrary, that if Albertine had these tastes, she would gratify them with others. And perhaps even these same girls, if they could have been elsewhere, would not have tortured my heart so acutely. It was Trieste, it was that unknown world in which I could feel that Albertine took a delight, in which were her memories, her friendships, her childhood loves, that exhaled that hostile, inexplicable atmosphere, like that atmosphere that used to float up to my bedroom at Combray, from dining-room in which I could hear, talking and laughing with strangers amid the clatter of knives and forks, Mamma who would not b e coming upstairs to say good-night to me; like the atmosphere that, for Swann, had filled the houses to which Odette went at night in search of inconceivable joys.
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 1158
Marcel continues to reflect upon his mad jealousy of Albertine, but maybe we're getting a clearer sense of its causes - and perhaps Marcel is as well. He has become fixated on Trieste because he associates it with Albertine, and with her lesbian desires. However, he has to admit that "this localisation of my jealousy was arbitrary, that if Albertine had these tastes, she would gratify them with others." What I'm beginning to think is that his jealousy (and, well, maybe all jealousy) is based on what he can't control, or at the very least he can't understand. Marcel refers to Marcel as "that unknown world," and maybe in his mind Albertine's sexuality, whether she be a lesbian or a bi-sexual, or maybe, more accurately, his perception of her sexuality, is another "unknown world." Furthermore, it is a world just maddeningly beyond his touch, which is why I think his reflection on his mother, taking us back to the beginning of the novel, is so key: "like that atmosphere that used to float up to my bedroom at Combray, from dining-room in which I could hear, talking and laughing with strangers amid the clatter of knives and forks, Mamma who would not b e coming upstairs to say good-night to me . . ." So, is all of this just a search for his mother's "unknown world"? I was involved with a woman once who was not particularly jealous (in fact, I wished that she would be a little more jealousy, because I tended to come and go without her notice), but she had one strange stab of jealousy. I was always completely honest with her in regards to the women I had been with, which she chronicled (I assumed for potential future use) but didn't seem particularly concerned about any of them. One time, during a conversation wherein I made the point that to me age is just a number, and in response to a direct question from her, I told her about a woman in her mid-40s that I'd had a brief fling with my senior year in college (she was a hairdresser, and, well, you know, those salons in small town in Indiana get boring - I feel that everything keeps coming back to Morrissey lately). Anyway, she told me that the thought it actually made her really jealous, which led me to promise that I would never go back in time and have an affair with a hairdresser twenty years older than me (which I don't think made the situation any better). Anyway, it was an odd response, partially because she was in her mid-40s (so there might have been some projection going on there) but also because she was completely ignoring a, at the time, fairly recent relationship that I'd had with a woman twenty years younger than me, which should have served as a much greater source of jealousy. Maybe the reason why she was so bothered by my memory was that it was so completely outside of her lived experience, her worldview, that it formed her own "unknown world"?
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