My Years With Proust - Day 478

   I had ceased for a moment to hear these words ringing in my ear while Albertine had been with me just now.  While kissing her, as I used to kiss my mother at Combray, to calm my anguish, I believed almost in Albertine's innocence, or at least did not think continuously of the discovery that I had made of her vice.  But now that I was alone the words rang out afresh like those noises inside the ear which one hears as soon as someone stops talking to one.  Her vice now seemed o me to be beyond any doubt.  The light of approaching sunrise, by modifying the appearance of things around me, made me once again, as if for a moment I were shifting my position in relation to it, even more bitterly aware of my suffering.  I had never seen the dawn of so beautiful or so sorrowful a morning.  And thinking of all the indifferent landscapes which were about to be lit up and which, only yesterday, would have filled me simply with the desire to visit them, I could not repress a sob when, with a gesture of oblation mechanically performed and symbolising, in my eyes, the bloody sacrifice which I was about to have to make of all joy, every morning, until the end of my life a solemn renewal, celebrated as every day dawned, or my daily grief and of the blood from my wound, the golden egg of the sun, as though propelled by the rupture of equilibrium brought about at the moment of coagulation by a change of density, barbed with tongues of flame as in a painting, burst through the curtain behind which one had sensed it quivering for a moment, ready to appear on the scene and to spring forward, and whose mysterious frozen purple it annihilated in a flood of light.  I heard myself weeping.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 1166

You know, it's easy to tweak Proust for producing overly florid prose, but few people have ever written so beautifully.  Most of us would be staring at the sunrise, feeling blue and trying to sort out our feelings for our pretend girlfriend.  For Proust, however: "I had never seen the dawn of so beautiful or so sorrowful a morning.  And thinking of all the indifferent landscapes which were about to be lit up and which, only yesterday, would have filled me simply with the desire to visit them, I could not repress a sob when, with a gesture of oblation mechanically performed and symbolising, in my eyes, the bloody sacrifice which I was about to have to make of all joy, every morning, until the end of my life a solemn renewal, celebrated as every day dawned, or my daily grief and of the blood from my wound . . ."  For me, beyond being blown away again by Proust's craft, what I'm trying to sort out is the nature of Marcel's "bloody sacrifice"?  Is the sacrifice cutting Albertine, his great love, loose or is it marrying her?  Does Marcel have such a messianic sense of his self, and of his own suffering, that he would marry Albertine solely to keep her from pursuing her own sapphic proclivities?  I don't use the word messianic light here.  How can you read this torrent of "blood" and "wound" and "sacrifice" and "oblation" without going there.

I'm also taken by his description of "so beautiful or so sorrowful a morning."  Can sorrow be beautiful? Certainly, it can in the realm of art.  You can't listen to Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony, the "Pathetique", without understanding the beauty of sorrow.  Or the famous plastic bag scene, with the Thomas Newman score, from American Beauty. But, again, this is art.  What about real life itself?  If there is beauty in perfection, then would not perfect sorrow be beautiful?  Hmm, I need to brood over this.