My Years With Proust - Day 552

And I ceased to follow the music, in order to ask myself once again whether Albertine had or had not seen Mlle Vinteuil during the last few days, as one interrogates anew an inner pain from which one has been distracted for a moment.  For it was in myself that Albertine's possible actions were performed.  Of every person we know we possess a double; but, being habitually situated on the horizon of our imagination, of our memory, it remains more or less extraneous to us, and what it has done or may have done has no greater capacity to cause us pain than an object situated at a certain distance which provides us with only the painless sensations of vision. The things that affect these people we perceive in a contemplative fashion; we are able to deplore them in appropriate language which gives other people a sense of our kindness of heart, but we do not feel them.  But ever since the wound I had received at Balbec, it was deep in my heart, and very difficult to extricate, that Albertine's double was lodged.  What I saw of her hurt me, as a sick man would be hurt whose senses were so seriously deranged that the sight of a colour would be felt by him internally like an incision in his living flesh.  It was fortunate that I had not already yielded to the temptation to break with Albertine; the tedium of having to rejoin her presently, when I went home, was a trifling matter compared with the anxiety that I should have felt if the separation had occurred when I still had a doubt about her and before I had had time to grow indifferent to her.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 254-255

Marcel continues to think about Albertine as he listens to the performance of Vinteuil's music.  Depending upon my mood I'd say he's reflecting and ruminating or maybe instead fretting and moping.  What we have to keep in mind is that he has a very visceral connection to Vinteuil's music, and thus to the specter of the composer's daughter.  Remember that years earlier Marcel, through a window (to be fair), had watched Vinteuil's daughter and another woman together in a moving and, at least for the age and for his age, shocking scene.  He had also witnessed Vinteuil's daughter and her lover saying very cruel things to a photograph of the conductor on a nearby table, with the picture forming a metaphor for their rejection of him and his beliefs - or, if you will, a metaphor for them freeing themselves from his tyranny (although he isn't presented as much of a tyrant, so maybe it's better to say the tyranny of the age's societal expectations).  Thus Vinteuil's daughter, at least for Marcel, ends up as the very manifestation of sex, or I guess to be more accurate of illicit homosexual sex, as well as of willful deception.  So, as Marcel thinks about the possibility of Albertine's being with Vinteuil's daughter, the fact that he's sitting there listening to the sonata had to make it all the more overwhelming.

But having said that, Proust is also aware of how much of  this experience was completely tied to his own experience, and thus, theoretically, within his ability to control.  As Proust tells us, "For it was in myself that Albertine's possible actions were performed."  By this he means that Albertine's actions and their ramifications live within his perception and memory and reaction to them.  As much as we, at least in our popular culture reading of him, want to turn Proust into a neuroscientist or a self-help guru, he also is at times a Stoic, or, more aptly, he speaks the language of Stoicism.  As much as emotion overwhelms him I suppose he was not much of a Stoic (about as much as I am), but you still get the sense that he's read the Stoics and defaults to some of their language and intellectual structure, even if his own passionate nature makes it a difficult fit. I've always felt that while we are often drawn to a religion or a philosophy that seems "natural" or "familiar" to us, we at the same time aspire to a philosophy that is exactly the opposite of how we feel about the world; much like we're often drawn to a lover who is our opposite in experience or temperament, hoping either consciously or unconsciously that she will "complete" us.  After all, there was a reason why the immoderate, arrogant, passionate Greeks talked such a good game about knowing thyself and control.  When Proust is saying that "it was in myself that Albertine's possible actions were performed" he sounds very much like someone who is at least familiar with Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius or other Stoic writers (something else for me to research someday).  Proust continues, "Of every person we know we possess a double; but, being habitually situated on the horizon of our imagination, of our memory, it remains more or less extraneous to us, and what it has done or may have done has no greater capacity to cause us pain than an object situated at a certain distance which provides us with only the painless sensations of vision" There is the real person, but there is also the double, our perception of that person, who we control within our own heart and mind, and while we rarely can control the former, we at least have a shot at controlling or at least moderating the excesses of the latter.

It Always Comes Back to the Ramayana

As if I don't have enough to fret over right now, I'm devoting time to looking at some of the thousands of pictures I've taken overseas.  I do need to finish prepping for tomorrow, but I'll go ahead and throw this one picture up.  On our trip to India last year we made it back to the sacred caves at Ellora, which the students liked even though we didn't have nearly enough time.  While there are pictures taken of me overseas, it is rare that I ask someone to take my picture; in this case I did.  Situated above me is a stone carving depicting scenes from the Ramayana, which I, of course, knew about and which my students figured out.  One of the students, parroting my own words, said, "It always comes back to the Ramayana!"  Yes, my friends, it does.  Now, if I could ever finish my damn book (manuscript) on, among other epics, the Ramayana, there might be more truth to those words.  This fall I need to figure out my trips for the following year.  One of them will almost certainly be a return to Zanzibar in January, but that still leaves me with one or two others.  I'm hoping to get back to India in spring 2019, although the nature of the trip is still up in the air.  I'm tempted to repeat the COR 270 Heroines & Heroes Ramayana-themed trip (which would include another swing through Sri Lanka), but I may also refashion it as a junior level trip, either as a version of my COR 330 Dar al-Islam: Yemen class, only focusing on the history and role of Islam in India, or maybe as a COR 320 Human Rights course looking at the complexity of human rights as a secular/philosophical construct as they interact with the Hindu caste system and the Islamic sense of human rights.

Not a bad picture, although I was hoping for more of the Ramayana and less of me.

My Years With Proust - Day 551

   But very soon, the triumphant motif of the bells having been banished, dispersed by others, I succumbed once again to the music; and I began to realise that if, in the body of this septet, different elements presented themselves one after another to combine at the close, so also Vinteuil's sonata and, as I later discovered, his other works as well, had been no more than timid essays, exquisite but very slight, beside the triumphal and consummate masterpiece now being revealed to me. And I could not help recalling by comparison that, in the same way too, I had thought of the other worlds that Vinteuil had created as being self-enclosed as each of my loves had been; whereas in reality I was obliged to admit that just as, within the context of the last of these - my love for Albertine - my first faint stirrings of love for her (at Balbec at the very beginning, then after the game of ferret, then on the night when she slept at the hotel, then in Paris on the foggy afternoon, then on the night of the Guermantes party, then at Balbec again, and finally in Paris where my life was now closely linked to hers) had been, so, if I now considered not my love for Albertine but my whole life, my other loves too had been no more than slight and timid essays that were paving the way, appeals that were unconsciously clamouring, for this vaster love; my love for Albertine.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 253-254

Proust rhapsodizes on the beauty of the Vinteuil sonata that has popped up now and again throughout Remembrance of Things Past, making it's first appearance back in Swann's Way.  I've discussed it before and I didn't make it clear that it is a fictional piece, mainly because, and here I will freely admit my own ignorance as I always do with my own students (how can you promote the value of Mencius's Heart of Shame if you won't own it yourself?), I didn't realize that it was a fictional piece. There is a lovely little piece which we now associate with the imagined sonata, but that was actually composed by Jorge Arriagada for Raoul Ruiz's 1999 film Le Temps Retrouve. Since the initial publication of the novel a cottage industry has developed devoted to identifying the inspiration for different characters or events in the work, and this is also true of the Vinteuil sonata.  There have been several pieces suggested, but apparently Proust himself in a letter to a friend revealed that his imagined sonata was inspired by Camille Saint-Saens's Violin Sonata No. 1 in D Minor.  Ironically, apparently Proust was not a fan of Saint-Saens nor of much of this particular sonata, but there's a passage in the final third of the work that he loved and that was the inspiration.

Having said all that, mainly, I suppose, to claim public shame for not realizing that the piece was fictional, what I really find interesting about the passage is Proust's comment about how once he discovered Vinteuil's master work he also found out that "his other works as well, had been no more than timid essays, exquisite but very slight, beside the triumphal and consummate masterpiece now being revealed to me."  Essentially, he's saying that what he thought was great was actually more a statement on his own ignorance. There is a story that when Paul McCartney played Brian Wilson an acetate of A Day in the Life from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band it almost broke Wilson.  Now, truthfully, I've never been a Beatles fan but I can see why.  Essentially the point of the story is that it made Wilson realize that what he was working on simply didn't measure up, that the world had moved on.  I think there are those moments that what you thought was great simply aren't.  The work that causes the realization could be brand new or it could be much older and it's just been sitting there waiting for you to discover it (and the new world).  I've told the story several times about reading Winesburg, Ohio for the first time when I was something like fourteen and how suddenly everything I'd ever read before seemed foolish and childlike and that I never read an age-appropriate work again throughout my teenage years.  The novel was old even then, and it had been sitting there for decades - in my romanticized retelling - waiting for me to discover it and to change my world. My musical equivalent of reading Anderson's novel would be the first time I heard Young's Tonight's the Night and a song like Tired Eyes; he was going someplace, and taking me with him, that others going, and suddenly all the other music I was listening to seemed pointless.  Not surprisingly, Proust takes the story of his discovery of Vinteuil's best work and uses it as a metaphor to discuss much bigger issues, especially, again, not surprisingly, his love for Albertine.  Proust tells us that he has learned that, "but my whole life, my other loves too had been no more than slight and timid essays that were paving the way, appeals that were unconsciously clamouring, for this vaster love; my love for Albertine." Not only do you need the outside spark, you also have to be in a place internally where you are ready to hear it or read it or experience it.  Recently I've started listening to Miles Davis's Bitches Brew and songs like Miles Runs the Voodoo Down and I feel that I'm starting to both really appreciate it and really love it (before I think I appreciated what it represented, but that's not the same as liking it). The album hasn't changed, but I have.  Why are so few of us happy in our love lives?  Think of the number of factors, both internal and external, that have to be in sync for that to happen.

Of course, the problem with this is that it totally acquiesces to the tyranny of the Present, which, as we all know, in turn almost always caves to the tyranny of the Transient.  While it might be OK for Marcel to view Gilberte as a natural stepping stone to Albertine it is certainly more than a bit dismissive of all of our past loves.  I suppose we're all guilty of thinking that our current lover is The One, which means that all of the previous ones formed a long path as we grew and evolved and matured, and learned something from every relationship, until we reached the point where we can successfully enjoy The Relationship.  Even though my ex-wife and I never reached the "death" part of til death due you part, I refuse to believe that she was nothing more than some training ground to prepare me for my current SO.  The same could be said for Lovely British Girl or Beautiful Australian Girl, or any of the other women who have had the great misfortune to spend time with me over the years.  Any of them could be The One and thus my current SO drops back to the practice squad?  As we know, our brain has a natural tendency to create a narrative and organizing all the women we've loved into some progression seems to be another example.

Yala National Park - the Not So Nice Animals

A useful general rule for leading an international trip with students is that when they get grouchy just take them to the beach.  We learned that in Zanzibar a couple years ago.  It was hot and the students were beat down, but one trip out to Prison Island and a little time on the beach there dramatically improved their mood.  On last March trip to India and Sri Lanka we finally made it to the beach on the next to last day.  When Cyndi and I were researching the Yala National Park we found out that it touched upon the ocean and that there was a beach there so we thought we might just be able to let the students walk on the beach.  I remember our great Sri Lankan guide saying "You really shouldn't go in the water because of the undertow" as Sally and Carolanne rushed past him and dove into the surf.  I've been meaning to post a series of pictures of the students, both at the beach and riding along in the jeeps.  They were a good lot and we dragged them all over India and Sri Lanka, as well as facing the possibility of getting stuck temporarily in Sri Lanka or India because of a visa issue, and they were happy every day.

Hannah and Scott in the jeep looking for beasties.

John, who was unfailingly jazzed every day and was a joy to travel with.  He was also the one who would stand up at dinner and make the heartfelt speeches.  And to think that when I first taught him on his first day at Champlain I was certain that I'd throw him out the window.  Soon, soon, all too soon, my brother, I know you'll make it back to India and Sri Lanka.

Jacob celebrating his Sri Lanka book and Sri Lanka.  He started off the semester a bit shy, but he's one of those students that you can just see grow day by day.

John and Sam taking picture on the journey through the park.  He was disappointed that I wouldn't let him climb on top of the jeep.

Left to right: Jess (reflective), Max (giving me attitude), Hannah (loving the beach), Hattie (talking smack).

Jess and Sam showing restraint and not rushing into the surf.

The same could not be said for Sally and Carolanne who almost bowled over our Sri Lankan guide in their mad dash to the ocean.  I think I may have won them all over to my belief that the Indian Ocean is the best ocean.

Charlotte taking the requisite selfie at the beach.

Max officially losing his shit at the beach.

Sally and Carolanne after being dragged out of the ocean. In the background you can see a peak that Michael Manfredi allegedly climbed when he "went for a walk on the beach."

Cyndi sporting her excellent Quitters Coffee shirt at the beach.

Some old beach bum showed up, oddly wearing a Rising Sun, Indiana t-shirt.

Several women on the trip taking the opportunity to tan, and in some cases burn, before it was back in the jeeps in search for more beasties.

Jess looking slightly disgruntled/abashed after a wave splashed over her and interrupted her nap.  

I think this was the moment when it began to dawn on the group when the trip was coming to a close.  The look on Sally's face (far left) said it all.

And Carolanne deciding to flash the Indian Ocean.  I guess I can post this picture since Carolanne sent it to me and featured it on her own blog.  This interaction was reported to me: Carolanne: "Charlotte, come with me.  I need you to take a picture of me topless." Charlotte: "Sure!"  Apparently it's now Carolanne's goal to flash all the oceans of the world, which I guess is not any dumber than having your picture taken everywhere wearing a Rising Sun, Indiana t-shirt.

Yala National Park - the Nice Animals

As if I don't have a dozen things I'm working on now, but I'm going to start to make a concerted effort to get caught up on some of my foreign travel pictures and posts. One of the best days from last spring's student trip to India and Sri Lanka was the day we spent at the Yala National Park in southern Sri Lanka.  We drove around for hours in jeeps checking out the beasties, and it was pretty amazing.  I have to give props to my most excellent friend Cyndi for finding out about the and doing the research.  I normally get abuse for my seeming hesitancy to include "nature shit" on the trips, although in Zanzibar I'm the one who browbeats Steve into include swimming with dolphins.  On the Yala trip we saw seventeen elephants, some only a couple feet away, and that was extraordinary.  The park also has a big population of leopards, but, not surprisingly they're much harder to find. I think of all the animals we saw in Yala the ones I liked the best were the iguanas, who seemed clearly to be up to no good (or maybe I'm just thinking about old Jonny Quest episodes).  The next to last picture below was of an iguana climbing down out of a tree where it had gone in search of bird eggs.  One of the birds was dive bombing him on the head so he gave up and headed out.

Next time I'll post some pictures of the more troublesome animals - my students.

My Years With Proust - Day 550

But the pain revives as soon as a new doubt enters our mind intact; even if we assure ourselves almost at once: "I shall deal with this, there'll be some way of avoiding suffering, it can't be true," nevertheless there has been a first moment in which we suffered as though we believed it. If we had merely limbs, such as legs and arms, life would be endurable.  Unfortunately we carry inside us that little organ which we call the heart, which is subject to certain maladies in the course of which it is infinitely impressionable as regards everything that concerns the life of a certain person, so that a lie - that most harmless of things, in the midst of which we live so unconcernedly, whether the lie be told by ourselves or by others - coming from that person, causes that little heart, which we ought to be able to have surgically removed, intolerable spasms.  Let us not speak of the brain, for our mind may go on reasoning interminably in the course of these spasms, but it does no more to mitigate them than by taking thought we can soothe an aching tooth.  It is true that this person is blameworthy for having lied to us, for she had sworn to us that she would always tell us the truth.  But we know from our own shortcomings towards other people how little such vows are worth.  And we wanted to give credence to them when they came from her, the very person to whose interest it has always been to lie to us, and whom, moreover, we did not choose for her virtues.  It is true that, later on, she would almost cease to have any need to lie to us - precisely when our heart will have grown indifferent to her lying - because when we shall no longer take an interest in her life.  We know this, and, notwithstanding, we deliberately sacrifice our own life, either by killing ourselves for her sake, or by getting ourselves sentenced to death for having murdered her, or simply by spending our whole fortune on her in a few years and then being obliged to commit suicide because we have nothing left in the world.  Moreover, however easy in one's mind one can imagine oneself to be when one loves, one always has love in one's heart in a state of precarious balance.  The smallest thing is enough to place it in the position of happiness; one glows with it, one smothers with affection not her whom we love but those who have raised one in her esteem, who have protected her from every evil temptation; one feels easy in one's mind, and a single word is enough - "Gilberte is not coming," "Mademoiselle Vinteuil is expected" for all the preconceived happiness towards which we were reaching out to collapse, for the sun to hide its face, for the compass card to resolve and let loose the inner tempest, which one day we shall be incapable of resisting.  On that day, the day on which the heart has become so fragile, friends who admire us will grieve that such trifles, that certain persons, can so affect us, can bring us to death's door.  But what can they do?  Is a poet is dying of septic pneumonia, can one imagine his friends explaining to the pneumococcus that the poet is a man of talent that it ought to let him recover?

Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 224-225

This is either one of Proust's most painfully honest passage or one of his most annoyingly self-pitying passages, depending upon your point of view.  Proust proposes, " If we had merely limbs, such as legs and arms, life would be endurable.  Unfortunately we carry inside us that little organ which we call the heart, which is subject to certain maladies in the course of which it is infinitely impressionable as regards everything that concerns the life of a certain person . . "  Certainly, every one of us has at one time or another wished that we had been born without a heart, or, I guess more accurate, the ability to fall helplessly and hopelessly and painfully in love with another person.  Of course, in the process you'd also eliminate one of the best reasons for being alive in the first place.  We've all had our hearts broken, although few of us - or at least I suspect few of us - would echo Proust on this front: "We know this, and, notwithstanding, we deliberately sacrifice our own life, either by killing ourselves for her sake, or by getting ourselves sentenced to death for having murdered her, or simply by spending our whole fortune on her in a few years and then being obliged to commit suicide because we have nothing left in the world."  So why do we do it, that is, why do we fall in love when it's almost certainly a losing game?  The obvious answer is that we can not not do it, although that's hardly a satisfying answer. St. Augustine said that we are never satisfied until we find God.  Obviously, that's a quest that normally doesn't end up going smoothly either.  Maybe we're simply at our best, maybe our most human, when we're striving after love, whether it be on the macro or the micro level.

Again? Yes,again.

Today is the first day of yet another semester here at Champlain College, and for some reason this picture made sense.  First off, in some ways I've really dropped the ball on this blog, at least in regards to its initial purpose.  When I started this a decade ago it was mainly designed as an apparatus for my family and friends to follow along on my adventures overseas.  I quickly realized that none of them cared or even bothered to read the blog.  In some sense this is to be expected, and it brings us back to Proust's discussion on divergence.  Even now I doubt if my current SO could find this blog if her life depended upon it.  Still, I blogged away if only for me (and, as I've noted before, I'm amazed when I go back and read earlier passages and discover that I have completely forgotten about them, both the original event and my later reflection, and it might as well have been written - and lived - by some stranger).  The last year and a half the blog has evolved into more a literary and music blog, which is perfectly cool because if I'm supposed to change every five years then by definition my blog has to - and should - change as well.  It does mean that I'm dreadfully far behind on blogging about my trips.  I have, seriously, dozens if not hundreds of posts that I need to do to get caught up.  Like Proust, I'm in a race against time and my own memory.  Secondly, today is the first day of my latest course-embedded trip to Zanzibar, as my excellent friend Steve Wehmeyer and I are embarking on a year-long linked interdisciplinary course that will features two weeks in Zanzibar in January.  It will be my fourth trip to Zanzibar, which defies logic.  By the time we return on 14 January I will have spent five weeks of my life there. And finally, this is the beginning of my, I believe, 29th year of full-time university teaching; in addition, I gave my first lecture 35 years ago and taught my first course 33 years ago.  Plus, I'm well into the last decade of my teaching career. If anything calls for a picture of a beautiful Zanzibar sun set it may be the recognition of time.

Soon, my brother, soon.

My Years With Proust - Day 549

Although an operation that Brichot had undergone had restored to some small extent the sight which he had thought to be lost forever, I do not know whether he had observed the ruffian following in the Barton's footsteps.  Not that this mattered much, for since la Raspeliere, and notwithstanding the professor's friendly regard for M. de Charlus, the sight of the latter always made him feel somehow uneasy.  No doubt to every man the life of every other extends along shadowy paths of which he has no inkling.  Lying, though it is so often deceptive and is the basis of all conversation, conceals less thoroughly a feeling of hostility, or of self-interest, or a visit which one wants to appear not to have paid, or a short-lived escapade with a mistress which one is anxious to keep from one's wife, than a good reputation covers up - to the extent of not letting its existence be guessed - sexual depravity.  It may remain unsuspected for a lifetime; an accidental encounter on a pier, at night, discloses it; even then this accidental discovery is frequently misunderstood and a third person who is in the know must supply the elusive clue of which everyone is unaware.  But, once known, it scares one by making one feel that that way madness lies, far more than by its immorality.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, p. 203

I was just carrying out a conversation with a friend about one of those ineffable topics, in this case the nature of the soul and whether or not, either in the Abrahamic tradition or as part of reincarnation, you ever create new souls or just play out the string with the souls that were present or were created at the beginning of the process.  And, as to be expected, along the way we discussed the fact that some things are simply unknowable, and that even if you suspect a plan of some kind you're going to be disappointed if you're expecting a concrete answer (at least soon).  Of course, isn't that essentially true on this side of the cosmic divide as well?  Proust notes, "No doubt to every man the life of every other extends along shadowy paths of which he has no inkling."  We've talked before about our natural habit of exoticizing other people's lives (that is, they have to be more interesting than ours). In this case I think Proust is saying that, but, more to the point, he's saying that we look out into the world and assume that somehow it makes sense in some secretive, if not perverse, fashion, which somehow be revealed.  Your affair is revealed because your wife is in a bookstore somewhere she never goes on a day when she's scheduled to be visiting her sister who cancelled because she was sick and your wife to get out of the rain goes in the strange bookstore and ends up knocking over a book from an author she never reads and picks it up at the same time as a person she barely knows and they end up discussing a movie based on another novel by the same author and who they unexpectedly bumped into in the lobby of the theater.  Essentially, we think that life has one of those tortured Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon connection that one generally only finds in a Dickens novel. Further, we think that we could figure out all of these "shadowy paths" if we just had some help.  While I've read the Quran several times it wasn't until I invested in Nasr's Study Quran (which features mountains of  commentary and analysis, and sometimes an entire dense page of micro-print footnotes to explain one sentence) that I truly began to explain things.  I just needed context and guidance and, for all intents and purposes, a religious and intellectual road map.  Essentially, I need the same thing for life - preferably a series of guiding footnotes that run along the bottom of my vision's screen.  However, even if I believed that to be the case - again, I think we create this structure in our imagination to make life either more interesting or at least bearable - would I really want to know the connections?  Proust warns, "But, once known, it scares one by making one feel that that way madness lies . . ."

My Years With Proust - Day 548

I offered him my arm to guide him on his way.  "This time it is not by great Charbourg that we meet," he said to me, "but by little Dunkirk," a remark which I found extremely tiresome, as I did not understand what it meant; and yet I darted not ask Brichot, dreading not so much his scorn as his explanations.  I replied that I was longing to see the drawing-room in which Swann used to meet Odette every evening.  "What, so you know that old story, do you?" he said.  "And yet from those days until Swann's death there's what the poet rightly calls 'grande spatium mortalis aevi.'"

   Swann's death had deeply distressed me at the time.  Swann's death!  Swann's, in this phrase, is something more than a mere genitive.  I mean thereby his own particular death, the death assigned by destiny to the service of Swann.  For we talk of "Death" for convenience, but there are almost as many different deaths as there are people.  We do not possess a sense that would enable us to see, moving at full speed in every direction, these deaths, the active deaths aimed by destiny at this person or that.  Often they are deaths that will not be entirely relieved of their duties until two or even three years later.  They come in haste to plant a tumour in the side of a Swann, then depart to attend to other tasks, returning only when, the surgeons having performed their operations, it is necessary to plant the tumour there afresh.  Then comes the moment when we read in the Gaulois that Swann's health has been causing anxiety but that he is now making an excellent recovery.  Then, a few minutes before the last gasp, death, like a sister of charity who has come to nurse rather than to destroy us, enters to preside over our last moments, and crowns with a final aureole the cold and stiffening creatures whose heart has ceased to beat.  And it is this diversity of deaths, the mystery of their circuits, the colour of their fatal badge, that makes so moving a paragraph in the newspapers as this:

   "We learn with deep regret that M. Charles Swann passed away yesterday at his residence in Paris after a long and painful illness.  A Parisian whose wit was widely appreciated, a discriminating but steadfastly loyal friend, he will be universally mourned, not only in those literary and artistic circles where the rare discernment of his taste made him a willing and a welcome guest, but also at the Jockey Club of which has was one of the oldest and most respected members.  He belonged also to the Union and the Agricole.  He had recently resigned his membership of the Rue Royale.  His witty and striking personality never failed to arouse the interest of the public at all the great events of the musical and artistic seasons,notably at private views, where he was a regular attendant until the last few years, when he rarely left his house.  The funeral will take place, etc."

Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 197-198

Charles Swann cast such a lengthy shadow over the early volumes of Remembrance of Things Past, including providing the name for volume one, Swann's Way, but then he faded into the background.  The penultimate line of the obituary, where we are told that "he was a regular attendant until the last few years, when he rarely left his house" might serve as a description for his role in the novel as well. Swann's sickness and his death were mentioned in passing a few times, but this is the first time that Proust dealt with it directly.  Even here, however, he takes the opportunity to speak of death more generally and more philosophically.

   To return to more general realities, it was of this death of his, foretold and yet unforeseen, that I had heard Swann speak himself to the Duchesse de Guermantes, on the evening of her cousin's party.  It was the same death whose striking and specific strangeness had recurred to me one evening when, as I ran my eye over the newspaper, my attention was suddenly arrested by the announcement of it, as though traced in mysterious lines inopportunely interpolated there.  They had sufficed to make of a living man someone who could never again respond to what one said to him, to reduce him to a mere name, a written name, that had suddenly passed from the real world to the realm of silence.  It was they that even now gave me a desire to get to know the house in which the Verdurins had formerly lived, and where Swann, who at that time was not merely a row of letters printed in a newspaper, had dined so often with Odette. I must also add (and this is what for a long time made Swann's death more painful than any other, although these reasons bore no relation to the individual strangeness of his death) that I had never gone to see Gilberte as I promised him at the Princesse de Guermantes's . . (pp. 199-200)

Proust opines, "For we talk of "Death" for convenience, but there are almost as many different deaths as there are people." In Concepts of the Self the students will read, and gripe about, Freeland's Portraits & Persons (well, the students in the other COR 110 classes will, because whining is not an option in mine).  One of her points that does resonate with the students is her discussion of the different versions of the Self: Bodily, Relational, Reflective and Moral.  That is, our perceptions of self, and thus our creation of our own Self, are shaped by different factors. One Self, the Relational Self, relates to how we are defined and in turn define ourselves by our association with others, and, naturally, this changes throughout your life (it does with the other versions of the Self as well, but it's really obvious with the Relational Self).  For example, classes start tomorrow and we now have 601 new students who can now define themselves as Champlain College students (which both expands and limits their sense of self), something they were not a year ago and something that will not mean the same thing ten years from now.  And while the connection of "Death" to the Bodily, Reflective and Moral Selves seems natural, maybe it is most important in relation to the Relational Self.  Marcel was most distressed by the death of Swann because it reminded him of his failure to keep a promise he had made to the dying Swann to go visit his daughter.  Reading Swann's obituary, or for that matter almost anyone's obituary, it is obvious how clearly we are defined by our relationships to others.  Soon, soon, all too soon, I will shuffle off this mortal coil and my obituary will report that I am an alumni from the doctoral program at the University of Cincinnati and that I was a member of the faculty at Champlain College for X years (probably 18) and that I was a participant in the Gentleman of Excellence, but it will not report that I was 6'4" and battled a bad hip for decades and the ways that my declining physical state influenced by decisions or that I routinely read Marcus Aurelius as a tool for personal reflection and the ways that it made me a better person and shaped my actions, and even if it shares that I was a member of the Islamic Society of Vermont it would not explain why.   The problem, at least in my reckoning, is that the Relational Self is in many ways the most fleeting, and, naturally, Marcus Aurelius reminds us that soon you will have forgotten the world and the world will have forgotten you.  I attended a Muslim funeral last year and one of the things that impressed me, and which I thought, oddly, were right and proper (probably I was thinking of Marcus Aurelius, as I always am), was that it had almost nothing to do with the person.  Instead the attendees were instructed that if they wanted to help they should pay the late person's debts or support education, either of their children or more generally by setting up scholarships, and you could go on a hajj for them (but only if you had already gone for yourself). However, after saying all that, it is interesting that Proust included the famous line from Tacitus, "grande spatium mortalis aevi." A rough translation would be: "Great space for mortal life."  That is, mortal life is short, but considering the potential to accomplish amazing things it is actually long.  And thus we come to my conflicted view of life and death.  I understood the Muslim funeral and I completely agree with Marcus Aurelius, but I also feel an intense, almost painful, desire to accomplish something of note before I exit stage left.  Making peace with this struggle requires more self-analysis, obviously.  For example, if I feel a need to finish my book (unpublished manuscript?) on the epics that is partially vanity, but it is also contributing, even if in a very small way, to the broader intellectual world.  However, I've abandoned my idea of having my ashes spread in the Wadi Rum, because that was truly just vanity (although I'll still leave my funds and arrangements for my son to go to Jordan solely so that we can "share" one of my favorite places).

My Years With Proust - Day 547

He was dead.  Dead forever?  Who can say?  Certainly, experiments in spiritualism offer us no more proof than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracts in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be forever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there - those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only - if then! - to fools.  So that the idea that Bergotte was not permanently dead is by no means improbable.

   They buried him, but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, p. 186

Proust's friend Bergotte had died, and this provided the author with the opportunity to ruminate, sadly very briefly, on the nature of the next world.  In a novel that devotes so much time to trying to make sense of the world Proust doesn't spend much time discussing religion or existential questions about what happens when we die. I guess it's not that surprising since it was an age when faith was on the retreat and thinkers like Freud, Marx and Darwin were constructing new theories of reality, each of which became religions in their own way. "Who can say?" is all Proust can come up with when asking himself whether Bergotte was dead forever.  Proust discusses obligations, ranging from the desire "to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite," to the pursuit of excellence and beauty, "like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist . ."  But why do we do these things?  Proust proposes, "All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there . . " He is hinting at a more beautiful world, a more ethereal world, a world that shapes and guides our own world, but he just can't seem to go any further, and laments that even this vision falls into the hands of fools.  And in the end he can only accept that, "So that the idea that Bergotte was not permanently dead was by no means improbable."  The other day I was meeting with some friends discussing Sufi mysticism, which is the odd thing that professors do in their spare time.  At one point I asked one of them, a long-time friend and almost certainly the smartest person I've ever known, whether he considered mysticism to be a "threat," and I was only partially trying to wind him up.  Mainly, I was asking whether he, a philosopher who strives for intellectual precision, was both fascinated by and troubled by mysticism because it existed, by definition, outside of the rational, and thus maybe controllable, universe.  I kept coming back to that exchange as I reread this passage from Proust.  Maybe Proust devoted so little time to issues of faith because he was such an extraordinarily precise thinker and religion never provided him with the definable and provable answers he sought.

Having said all of that, I think I'm more interested in his response, and Bergotte's response, to Vermeer's painting View of Delft, which played a role in the latter's death.

Bergotte's death came to him the day after he had thus entrusted himself to one of these friends (a friend? or an enemy, rather?) who proved too strong for him.  The circumstances of his death were as follows.  A fairly mile attack of uraemia had led to his being ordered to rest.  But an art critic having written somewhere that in Vermeer's View of Delft (lent by the Gallery at The Hague for an exhibition of Dutch painting), a picture which he adored and imagined that he knew by heart, a little patch of yellow wall (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it was if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself, Bergotte ate a few potatoes, left the house, and went to the exhibition.  At the first few steps he had to climb, he was overcome by an attack of dizziness.  He walked past several pictures and was struck by the aridity and pointlessness of such an artificial kind of art, which was greatly inferior to the sunshine of a windswept Venetian palazzo, or an ordinary house by the sea.  At last he came to the Vermeer which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic's article, he noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the sand as pink, and, finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall.  His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall.  "That's how I ought to have written," he said.  "My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall." Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his condition.  In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow.  He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter. (pp. 184-185)

Bergotte slumped back against the circular settee and died.

Johannes Vermeer's View of Delft from 1661. By all accounts this was one of Proust's favorite paintings. Time is a funny thing.  While in most ways Proust seems glaringly modern artistically, he still lived and wrote a century ago; and when he stood before Vermeer's work he was interacting with a painting that was already over two hundred years ago.  I wonder if he, while standing in front of View of Delft, considered whether future generations would still know and appreciate the work, just as we do when we read Remembrance of Things Past?

It's difficult to not read the description of Bergotte's death and not think that it is one of the most autobiographical moments in an intensely autobiographical novel. First off, View of Delft was one of Proust's favorite paintings, if not his own personal favorite. Vermeer's view across the the water seems a perfect visual rendering of Proust's own preoccupation with looking back over the years to focus in on the truth.  The desire to keep looking, intensely and more deeply, until you found that little stretch of yellow wall, seems very Proustian to me.  And finally, Bergotte's willingness to sacrifice his health to the pursuit of knowledge and beauty just reads like Proust's own final years.  In the end, if you create something that lives on does it matter if you do?  In that light, Proust's final words on Bergotte are prophetic of his own end: "They buried him, but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection."

My Years With Proust - Day 546

   To make her chains appear light, the clever thing seemed to me to be to make her believe that I myself was about to break them.  But I could not confide this mendacious plan ot her at that moment, since she had returned so sweetly from the Trocadero that afternoon; the most I could do, far from distressing her with the threat of a rupture, was to keep to myself those dreams of a perpetual life together which my grateful heart had formed. As I looked at her, I found it hard to restrain myself from pouring them out to her, and she may perhaps have noticed this.  Unfortunately the expression of such feelings is not contagious.  The case of an affected old woman like M. de Charlus who, by dint of never seeing in his imagination anything but a proud young man, thinks that he has himself become a proud young man, all the more so the more affected and ridiculous he becomes - this case is more general, and it is the misfortune of an impassioned lover not to realise that while he sees in front of him a beautiful face, his mistress is seeing his face, which is not made any more beautiful, far from it, when it is distorted by the pleasure that is aroused in it by the sight of  beauty.  Nor indeed does love exhaust the generality of this case; we do not see our own bodies, which other people see, and we "follow" our own train of thought, the object, invisible to other people, which is before out eyes.  At times the artist reveals this object in his work.  Whence it arises that the admirers of that work are disappointed in its author, on whose face that inner beauty is imperfectly reflected.

   Every person we love, indeed to a certain extent every person, is to us like Janus, presenting to us a face that pleases us if the person leaves us, a dreary face if we know him or to be at our perpetual disposal.  In the case of Albertine, the prospect of her continued society was painful to me in another way which I cannot explain in this narrative.  It is terrible to have the life of another person attached to one's own like bomb which one holds in one's hands, unable to get rid of it without committing a crime.  But one has only to compare this with the ups and down, the dangers, the anxieties, the fear that false but probable things will come to be believed when we will no longer be able to explain them - feelings that one experiences if one lives on intimate terms with a madman.  For instance, I pitied M. de Charlus for living with Morel (immediately the memory of the scene that afternoon made me feel that the left side of my chest was heavier than the other); leaving aside the relations that may or may not have existed between them, M. de Charlus must have been unaware at the outset that Morel was mad.  Morel's beauty, his stupidity, his pride must have deterred the Barton from exploring so deeply, until the days of melancholia when Morel accused M. de Charlus of responsibility for his sorrows, without being able to furnish any explanation, abusing him for his want of trust with the help of false but extremely subtle arguments, threatened him with desperate resolutions in the midst of which there persisted the most cunning regard for his own immediate interests.  But all this is only a comparison.  Albertine was not mad.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 179-180

I know this is a "duh" comment, but some people are not meant to be with other people, and I don't mean in a misanthropic/anti-social way in regards to general society, but rather that they're not meant to have that romanticized relationship with one person.  And more and more I believe that Proust, or at least his fairly fictionalized alter ego, Marcel, was one of those people.  He tells us, " Every person we love, indeed to a certain extent every person, is to us like Janus, presenting to us a face that pleases us if the person leaves us, a dreary face if we know him or to be at our perpetual disposal."  Essentially, Albertine, or any woman for that matter, is beautiful if she's leaving but dreary if she's staying.  Further, he opines, "It is terrible to have the life of another person attached to one's own like bomb which one holds in one's hands, unable to get rid of it without committing a crime." Obviously, it's perfect OK to be this person, as long as you know you're this person, otherwise you will leave a swath of emotional destruction in your wake.  A very good friend of mine is a relatively new relationship and we're all hoping against hope that this one works out because he desperately wants to be in a relationship.  Another friend of mine is not in a relationship, has never in my memory been in a relationship, has no desire to be in a relationship (and not in a wham bam thank you ma'am sort of way, he just prefers his own solitude) but completely understands his own nature and doesn't pursue relationships, and thus cause unintended problems, simply because society expects him to be in a relationship.  If you truly know your own heart, and are conscious of other sentient beings in your immediate universe, then it probably doesn't matter what path you choose. On the one hand Proust's observation about every person being like Janus is a truism, but on the other hand it may be even more true for him personally than he realizes.  Maybe he is one of those people who is not really meant to be with another person.  When we think of him at the end, locked away in his Parisian apartment, sleeping all day and writing all night, racing death to finish Remembrance of Things Past, it's easy to think of it as a sad end; maybe it's better to think of it as his happiest, most contented time. Finally, he was free of the relationship whirlwind.

The other line from this short passage that jumped out at me is: "In the case of Albertine, the prospect of her continued society was painful to me in another way which I cannot explain in this narrative." In a novel of 3304 pages it's difficult to imagine that there were things that he couldn't find the time to explain.  Now, I guess you could propose that he meant in this brief little mini-narrative inside of the meta-narrative he didn't have time to talk about it, and thus this is more of a case of imprecise language.  There are many charges one could level against Proust, but imprecise language is not one of them. I guess this is another side avenue I need to explore down the road when I'm finished with my initial consideration of the novel.  Stupid Proust, he's always giving me more homework.

My Years With Proust - Day 545

True, in order to possess, one must first have desired.  We do not possess a line, a surface, a mass unless it is occupied by our love. But Albertine had not been for me during our drive, as Rachel had once been, a meaningless dust of flesh and clothing.  At Balbec, the imagination of my eyes, my lips, my hands had so solidly constructed, so tenderly polished her body that now, in this car, in order to touch that body, to contain it, I had no need to press my own body against Albertine, nor even to see her; it was enough for me to hear her, and, if she was silent, to know that she was by my side; my interwoven senses enveloped her completely and when, on our arrival at the house, she quite naturally alighted, I stopped for a moment to tell the chauffeur to call for me later, but my eyes enveloped her still as she passed ahead of me under the arch, and it was still the same, inert, domestic calm that I felt as I saw her thus, solid, flushed, opulent and captive, returning home quite naturally with me, like a woman who belonged to me, and, protected by its walls, disappearing into our house.  Unfortunately, she seemed to feel herself in prison there, and - judging by her mournful, weary look that evening as we dined together in her room - to share the opinion of that Mme de La Rochefoucauld who, when asked whether she was not glad to live in so beautiful a house as Liancourt, replied: "There is no such thing as a beautiful prison." I did not notice it at first; and it was I who bemoaned the thought that, had it not been for Albertine (for with her I should have suffered too acutely from jealousy in an hotel where all day long she would have been exposed to contact with many people), I might at that moment be dining in Venice in one of those little low-ceilinged restaurants like a ship's saloon, from which one looks out on the Grand Canal through little curved windows encircled with Moorish mouldings.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 173-174

"There is no such thing as a beautiful prison." Proust quotes this line as he lays out a poignant scene which expresses so much of the mood of The Captive.  Marcel, inexplicably notes his surprise at Albertine's response: "Unfortunately, she seemed to feel herself in prison there, and - judging by her mournful, weary look that evening as we dined together in her room . . ." 

However, the line that summed it up best for me is the following: "she quite naturally alighted, I stopped for a moment to tell the chauffeur to call for me later, but my eyes enveloped her still as she passed ahead of me under the arch, and it was still the same, inert, domestic calm that I felt as I saw her thus, solid, flushed, opulent and captive, returning home quite naturally with me, like a woman who belonged to me, and, protected by its walls, disappearing into our house." Of all the very Proustian descriptors the one that jumped up most appropriately for me was "inert."  By that point Albertine was beyond reactive or docile or domestic; she had passed on to inert.  What strikes me how she was already imprisoned, already inert, long before this moment.  Proust, like all of us to be fair, remembers that time early in the relationship when he could not keep his hands off Albertine: "At Balbec, the imagination of my eyes, my lips, my hands had so solidly constructed, so tenderly polished her body that now, in this car, in order to touch that body, to contain it, I had no need to press my own body against Albertine, nor even to see her . . " But now he feels no need to tenderly polish her body.  It's enough that she will dutifully enter her jail cell.  From the moment he could easily keep his hands off Albertine she had begun to grow inert. Sadly, all of us understand that chemistry lesson.

My Years With Proust - Day 544

   Further on, another little girl was kneeling beside her bicycle, which she was putting to rights.  The repair finished, the young racer mounted her machine, but without straddling it as a man would have done.  For a moment the bicycle swerved, and the young body seemed to have added to itself a sail, a huge wing; and presently we saw the young creature speed away, half-human, half-winged, angel or peri, pursuing her course.

   This was what the presence of Albertine, this was what my life with Albertine, deprived me of.  Deprived me, did I say?  Should I not have thought rather: what it presented to me?  If Albertine had not been living with me, if she had been free, I should have imagined, and with reason, every one of these women as a possible or indeed a probable object of her desire, of her pleasure.  They would have appeared to me like dancers in a diabolical ballet, representing the Temptations to one person, and shooting their darts into the heart of another.  Midinettes, schoolgirls, actresses, how I should have hated them all! Objects of horror, for me they would have been excluded from the beauty of the universe.  Albertine's servitude, by releasing me from suffering on their account, restored them to the beauty of the world.  Now that they were harmless, having lost the sting that stabs the heart with jealousy, I was free to admire them, to caress them with my eyes, another day more intimately perhaps.  By shutting Albertine away, I had at the same time restored to the universe all those glittering wings that flutter in public gardens, ballrooms, theatres, and which became tempting once more to me because she could no longer succumb to their temptation.  They composed the beauty of the world.  They had at one time composed that of Albertine.  It was because I had seen her first as a mysterious bird, then as a great actress of the beach, desired, perhaps won, that I had thought her wonderful.  As soon as she was a captive in my house, the bird that I had seen one afternoon advancing with measured tread along the front, surrounded by a congregation of other girls like seagulls alighted from who knew where, Albertine had lost all her colours, together with all the opportunities that other people had of securing her for themselves.  Gradually she had lost her beauty.  It required excursions like this, in which I imagined her, but for my presence, accosted by some woman or by some young man, to make me see her again amid the splendour of the beach, although my jealousy was on a different plane from the decline of the pleasures of my imagination.  But in spite of these abrupt reversions in which, desired, by other people, she once more became beautiful in my eyes, I might very well have divided her stay with me into two periods, in the first of which she was still, although less so every day, the glittering actress of the beach, and in the second of which, become the grey captive, reduced to her drab self, she needed these flashes in which I remembered the past to restore her colour to her.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 170-171

After I officiated at the wedding of my friends Heidi and Andy, my great friend Mike Kelly, by way of a compliment, proposed that I had shared some serious truth in my sermon.  By that he meant that I had not only spoken the truth, but shared some essential truth.  In this passage Proust shares some serious truth, both in regards to his own shortcoming but also the shortcomings of us as humans.  When considering what he might have as a free man, Proust tells us, "This was what the presence of Albertine, this was what my life with Albertine, deprived me of." While this statement might demand a collective dope slap from the readers, he then immediately follows it with,  "Deprived me, did I say?  Should I not have thought rather: what it presented to me?"  If almost everything comes back to Proust, everything always comes back to Marcus Aurelius.  In the Meditations we are told, "Choose not to be harmed - and you won't be harmed.  Don't feel harmed - and you haven't been." Or, as Epictetus, an even earlier Stoic, tells us, "It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters." Essentially, it's all about perception.  On one level Proust understands this because he immediately calls himself on it when he writes, "Should I not have thought rather: what it presented to me?"  I think it was Dostoevsky who described man as the ungrateful biped.  It is in some ways the beauty/curse of the human condition.  We strive and create because on some level we are not satisfied and dream of better worlds. Gombrich, in the Story of Art, proposed that Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, who he credits with the origins of modern art, were united in one thing: dissatisfaction. It also means that we are, well, dissatisfied. And we can completely understand the nature of our dissatisfaction, and its concomitant idiocy/irony, and still be dissatisfied.

What inspired this moment of intense self-reflection?  As with most male moments of epiphany it relates to seeing a beautiful woman.  "For a moment the bicycle swerved, and the young body seemed to have added to itself a sail, a huge wing; and presently we saw the young creature speed away, half-human, half-winged, angel or peri, pursuing her course." He is taken with her beauty, and for that matter the beauty of all women.  What makes this all the more complex, and fascinating, is that his perception of the women was colored both by his imagined freedom and Albertine's real captivity. "If Albertine had not been living with me, if she had been free, I should have imagined, and with reason, every one of these women as a possible or indeed a probable object of her desire, of her pleasure.  They would have appeared to me like dancers in a diabolical ballet, representing the Temptations to one person, and shooting their darts into the heart of another.  Midinettes, schoolgirls, actresses, how I should have hated them all! Objects of horror, for me they would have been excluded from the beauty of the universe."  So, he was viewing the women not solely through the lens of his own carnality (Marcel, unlike me, was not free of the carnal whirlwind) but through Albertine's, or at least his perception of Albertine's.  If Albertine were free in the world Marcel would not be able to view the women dispassionately as paragons of aesthetic beauty, and obviously we're through the looking glass here because we're talking about viewing them passionately, because of his fear that they would all become lovers of Albertine.  However, because Albertine was not, in fact, free, he could appreciate the women for their beauty.  "Albertine's servitude, by releasing me from suffering on their account, restored them to the beauty of the world."  OK, this is remarkably self-serving, but it does bring up interesting questions about perception and beauty.  As I've discussed previously, at various times in my long life I've been involved with very jealous women, who tended to view other women as a threat (although, truthfully, who would want me?).  Using Proust's logic, or at least his definition, would this mean that they would have not have been able to appreciate the beauty of other women as an aesthetic concept?  Essentially, just as my own base carnal desires (in the days before I was free of the whirlwind) would have contaminated my ability to view women as beautiful on some sort of dispassionate aesthetic scale, the jealous women in my life would have been unable to judge the aesthetic beauty of women in our immediate universe because of their own fear of my base carnal desires (in the days before I was free of the whirlwind)?  So, similar to Marcel during Albertine's captivity, after my death my jealous ex-lovers (who will doubtless show up to my funeral, wearing red dresses) will rediscover beauty.

Proust's logic is almost certainly flawed, although he makes an interesting point.  That said, he also damaged it by saying, "Now that they were harmless, having lost the sting that stabs the heart with jealousy, I was free to admire them, to caress them with my eyes, another day more intimately perhaps."  By damaging I mean that it comes back to his own desire and not some dispassionate appreciation of beauty.

In the end, what is sad about all of this is that Albertine suffered because of Proust's mania. Proust tells us, "It was because I had seen her first as a mysterious bird, then as a great actress of the beach, desired, perhaps won, that I had thought her wonderful.  As soon as she was a captive in my house, the bird that I had seen one afternoon advancing with measured tread along the front, surrounded by a congregation of other girls like seagulls alighted from who knew where, Albertine had lost all her colours, together with all the opportunities that other people had of securing her for themselves.  Gradually she had lost her beauty."  This, of course, brings us back to our discussion last week about the varying divergence between potential possession of a lover and certain possession of our lover.  Albertine's captivity freed the rest of the women in the world and made them beautiful again, but only stole her own beauty. "But in spite of these abrupt reversions in which, desired, by other people, she once more became beautiful in my eyes, I might very well have divided her stay with me into two periods, in the first of which she was still, although less so every day, the glittering actress of the beach, and in the second of which, become the grey captive, reduced to her drab self, she needed these flashes in which I remembered the past to restore her colour to her."

Albertine, the "grey captive."

My Years With Proust - Day 543

I noticed that, whenever Albertine looked for a moment at these girls with deep attentiveness, she at once turned round towards me.  But I was not unduly troubled, either by the intensity of this contemplation, or by its brevity which was compensated by that intensity; indeed, as to the latter, it often happened that Albertine, whether from exhaustion, or because it was an attentive person's way of looking at other people, would gaze thus in a sort of brown study either either at my father or at Francoise; and as for the rapidity with which she turned to look at me, it might be due to the face that Albertine, knowing my suspicions, might wish, even if they were unjustified, to avoid laying herself open to them.  This attention, moreover, which would have seemed to me criminal on Albertine's part (and quite as much so if it had been directed at young men), I myself fastened upon all the midinettes without thinking it reprehensible for a moment, almost deciding indeed that it was reprehensible of Albertine to prevent me, by her presence, from stopping the car and going to join them.  We consider it innocent to desire, and heinous that the other person should do so.  And this contrast between what concerns oneself on the one hand, and on the other than person one loves, is not confined only to desire, but extends also to lying. What is more usual than a lie, whether it is a question of masking the daily weaknesses of a constitution which we wish to be thought strong, of concealing a vice, or of going off, without offending other people, to the thing that we prefer?  It is the most necessary means of self-preservation, and the one that is most widely used. Yet this is the thing that we actually propose to banish from the life of the person we love, we watch for it, scent it, detest it everywhere.  It distresses us, it is sufficient to bring about a rupture, it seems to us to conceal the gravest misdemeanours, except when it conceals them so effectively that we do not suspect their existence.  A strange state, this, in which we are so inordinately sensitive to a pathogenic agent whose universal proliferation makes it inoffensive to other people and so baneful to the wretch who finds that he is no longer immune to it!

Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 167-168

You know, it's easy to read Remembrance of Things Past, especially when you're working your way through The Captive, and begin to develop a real dislike for Marcel. You do not have to be much of a practicing feminist to grow angry, or at least exhausted, listening to the set of rules that apply to Albertine which seem to not apply to him.  That said, I think he does understand the hypocrisy of so much of what he feels and say about Albertine.  As he admits in this section, "We consider it innocent to desire, and heinous that the other person should do so."  There's always a disconnect between what we say and what we believe, just as there's a disconnect between what we expect of others and what we accept from ourselves. As Teddy tells Leonard at the end of the brilliant Memento, "So you lie to yourself to be happy, we all do it." Either we consciously lie to ourselves to get through the day or we unconsciously lie to ourselves to get through the day.  Maybe hypocrisy is the conscious lie, whereas the unconscious lie takes us into the realm of cognitive dissonance and Freudian defense mechanisms.  That said, the act can still be hypocritical even if the decision is not a conscious one.  Proust, who I think really would have liked Memento (since all of Remembrance of Things Past is a search for lost time), continues: "What is more usual than a lie, whether it is a question of masking the daily weaknesses of a constitution which we wish to be thought strong, of concealing a vice, or of going off, without offending other people, to the thing that we prefer?" Life may be wonderful and filled with beauty (if we'll only take the time to look up occasionally) it is also long and complicated and cruel, and so we construct fortifications, lying, at least according to Proust, is one of the most common and effective of the fortifications.  "It is the most necessary means of self-preservation, and the one that is most widely used." Now, Leonard is dealing, at least theoretically, with a brain injury and is not consciously lying, although he may have been consciously lying at one time and the mental/moral strain of it led to a psychic collapse that led to the actually injury-free amnesia that limits his ability to process the world (again, there are many ways to tackle Memento).  Marcel doesn't have that excuse.  Does the recognition of the disparity between what he expects of Albertine (or any lover) and what he accepts from himself - and the resultant role that lying plays in making it all work out - represent some sort of redemptive first step?