"Certainly, of the extent of this love Swann had no direct knowledge. When he sought to measure it, it happened sometimes that he found it diminished, shrunken almost to nothing; for instance, the very moderate liking, amounting almost to dislike, which, in the days before he was in love with Odette, he had felt for her expressive features, her faded complexion, returned on certain days. 'Really, I am making distinct headway,' he would tell himself on the morrow, 'when I come to think it over carefully, I find that I got hardly any pleasure, last night, out of being in bed with her; it's an odd thing, but I actually thought her ugly.' And certainly he was sincere, but his love extended a long way beyond the province of physical desire. Odette's person, indeed, no longer held any great place in it. When his eyes fell upon the photograph of Odette on his table, or when she came to see him, he had difficulty in identifying her face, either in the flesh or on the pasteboard, with the painful and continuous anxiety which dwelt in his mind. He would say to himself, almost with astonishment, 'It is she!' as when suddenly someone shows us in a detached, externalized form one of our own maladies, and we find in it no resemblance to what we are suffering. 'She?' - he tried to ask himself what that meant; for it is something like love, like death (rather than like those vague conceptions of maladies), a thin which one repeatedly calls in question, in order to make oneself probe further into it, in the fear that the question will find no answer, that the substance will escape our grasp - the mystery of personality. And this malady, which was Swann's love, had so far multiplied, was so closely interwoven with all his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his sleep, his life, even with what he hoped for after his death, was so entirely one with him that it would have been impossible to wrest it away without almost entirely destroying him; as surgeons say, his case was past operation."
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 325-326
I love Proust's discussion of our attempts to talk ourselves, rationally, out of being in love, including "reminding" ourselves that the woman really isn't that good looking and, come to think of it, not very good in bed. Of course, our heart or unconscious mind or brain chemistry has a completely different agenda. I can remember a particular time when I was madly, passionately in love and had my heart shredded pretty thoroughly. I took off for a seven week, seven country trip that took me from the Middle East to a sojourn across the Silk Road in China to eastern Europe to, finally, the backstreets of Barcelona in Spain. The trip was mainly academic, but had also become essentially a quest to expunge her from my mind. My clearest memory was standing in a Buddhist temple in Beijing praying, in classic Buddhist fashion to remove all distracting passion, for her to disappear from my mind and heart. Yeah, about that. And so ended my brief seven minute flirtation with becoming a Buddhist (and, of course, the infamous fight with the Tibetan monk; but, seriously, who hasn't had that happen?). When I finally made it back to Vermont I knew that I would run into her and had prepared this whole exchange in my head wherein she would ask if she could stop by and I would say, "No, I would prefer that you didn't." And then I would be free, and clearly well on my way to achieving Nirvana. My second day back I did run into her, and she did ask if she could swing by (even though I was comically averting my eyes so as not to have to look at her), and I replied, classically, "Yeah, that would be great." As Homer would say, "Doh!" Clearly, I was "past operation."
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