My Year With Proust - Day 79

   "The first of these days - to which the snow, a symbol of the powers that were able to deprive me of the sight of Gilberte, imparted the sadness of a day of separation, almost the aspect of a day of departure, because it changed the outward form and almost forbade the use of the customary sense of our only encounters, now altered, covered, as it were, in dust-sheets - that day, none the less, marked a stage in the progress of my love, for it was, in a sense, the first sorrow that she was to share with me."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 418-419

In this brief passage Proust reflects on a day when snow kept him from meeting his friend, and love, Gilberte on the Champs-Elysees.  There is a beautifully elegiac feel to this section, as there is, clearly, to so much of Remembrance of Things Past.  It begs the question - is this one of the reasons why I love Proust so much?  My students will always complain, well, theatrically complain, that whatever I'm having them read at the moment has to be the saddest piece of literature of all time - at least until the next choice, which they will then assure me has somehow topped its predecessor.  To be fair, they may be on to something. I've always been drawn more to sad or wistful or tragic or elegiac stories (and moves and music) than their sunnier counterparts (which helps explain why it is always Schubert over Schumann, and how Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony is my favorite).  And it helps explain why the first novel I ever fell in love with is Winesburg, Ohio.  But why?  I guess I've always found the sad to be more honest and dependable, and, I suppose, believable, than the happy.  Or maybe there is something more intrinsically beautiful about sorrow than about delight, or at least something than can be more tangibly reproduced aesthetically.  If that is true, is it because the human condition is, at its heart, about sadness, so it can be better reproduced artistically because it is, in fact, more true?