My Year With Proust - Day 2

"But I cannot express the discomfort I felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until I thought no more of the room than of myself.  The anaesthetic effect of custom being destroyed, I would begin to think and to feel very melancholy things."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 10

I wonder if I've ever had a room that I filled so clearly with my own personality that I thought no more of it than I did of myself.  Or, for that matter, have I ever had a relationship that I filled so clearly with my own personality that I thought no more of it than I did of myself.  My father has often opined that growing up I was never quite there.  On the one hand the combination of that, and the fact that I always did well in school, made me a pretty easy child to raise.  I remember when Brenda, Gary and I lived in Atlanta my Mom and Dad (obviously before they split) came to visit us in our apartment.  My Dad, and I'll give him credit for this, told me that it was only after the other kids that he realized what an easy kid I was to raise.  At the same time, however, I'm sure it made me a very frustrating child to raise because I was always someplace else intellectually and emotionally.

Maybe this was why I wasn't such a great husband.  Maybe I was never truly there for Brenda, just as I wasn't there for my Mom and Dad and siblings.  Why wasn't I there?  I don't think I was ever cruel, just not there as I should have been.  I've often told my son that if I had to do it over again I would have fought with his mother instead of just withdrawing and trying to make it work.  Did I not fight because I cared too much or because I cared too little - or simply because I wasn't truly there.  It could well be that answering that question is the most important thing I need to figure out over the next year.  Laura had this habit (90% cute and 10% annoying) of shaking her hand in front of my face when I was reading. Doubtless, there's a metaphor there somewhere.

Milan Kundera, in one of my favorite novels, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, wrote "The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.  Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.  What then shall we choose?  Weight or lightness?"

I remember talking to Jen about my apartment in Abu Dhabi, pointing out that I owned almost nothing; in fact, I had so little there that I could have walked away at any time and not given it a second thought. It was almost Graham Dalton's (the James Spader character from Sex, Lies and Videotape) one key philosophy - the notion that you should live your life in such a way that you only needed one key.  If you had to have a car then you could not have anything in your apartment that was so valuable that you had to lock the door, and if you did have something in your apartment valuable enough to warrant locking the door then you couldn't have a car.  She thought it sounded terrible, but to me at the time it sounded like perfection (to be fair, my close friend Cyndi Brandenburg also thought it sounded great). That said, in the end I didn't choose that life, and instead came back to Vermont to a life full of burdens.  So, in the end, I guess I chose weight over lightness. Now, in the end I have to figure out if weight equals presence.