My Year With Proust - Day 17

"We try to discover in things, endeared to us on that account, the spiritual glamour which we ourselves have cast upon them; we are disillusioned, and learn that they are in themselves barren and devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds, to the association of certain ideas; sometimes we mobilize all our spiritual forces in a glittery array so as to influence and subjugate other human beings who, as we very well know, are situated outside ourselves, where we can never reach them."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 90

As I discussed lat time, I have very mixed emotions about the upcoming trip to Zanzibar, and on one level am afraid that it will end up being "barren and devoid of . . . charm."  Yes, Zanzibar is beautiful, and the warm and enveloping ocean breezes coming in off the Indian Ocean will be especially welcome as we leave behind the bitter dregs of the end of another Vermont winter.  Also, there is a vibe, a feel, that comes with Zanzibar, which is so different than emotionally cold and judgmental Vermont. Still, Zanzibar, as all things, is shaped by an "association of certain ideas."  Will it be the same place I left?  It was a place and a time where, for the first time after dragging my heels for months, began to believe that there was the possibility of another world, and one where I could be really happy. In the end those dreams, like footprints washed away by waves, disappeared.  So, if it is going to be a different place, then maybe the key is for me to arrive as a different person. I think it was Heraclitus who proposed that you can never step in the same stream twice because every second brings change, the only constant, to the stream (and the world). Even if I am, by definition, a different person than the one who visited Zanzibar for the first time three years ago, I also need to very consciously attempt to be a different person.  I need to rediscover Zanzibar - and the world - as an entirely new person.

There is so much more in this brief little section.  The line, "sometimes we mobilize all our spiritual forces in a glittery array so as to influence and subjugate other human beings who, as we very well know, are situated outside ourselves, where we can never reach them." I'm thinking back to a couple posts ago where I was reflecting on how we can internalize literary characters, allowing them to live within us, in a way that we (or at least, I) cannot pull off with real human beings; the significance being is that it helps us understand why 'real' people come and go and disappear from our lives in a way that literary characters don't. However, in the end maybe that's OK. Since the other human beings are situated outside of us it increases the chances that they'll surprise us, hopefully in a good way, although my experience has been the opposite. Oddly, maybe it gives us a reason, although I suspect more likely an excuse, for not understanding them. It can free us. As the Kate Winslet character Clementine says in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, "But I'm just a fucked-up girl who's lookin' for my own peace of mind; don't assign me yours."