My Year With Proust - Day 106

   "But her parents were not content with singing the praises of Gilberte - that same Gilberte who, even before I had set eyes on her, used to appear to me standing in front of a church, in a landscape of the Ile-de-France, and later, awakening in me not dreams now but memories, was embowered always in a hedge of pink hawthorn, in the little lane that I took when I was going the Meseglise way.  Once when I had asked Mme Swann (making an effort to assume the indifferent tone of a friend of the family, curious to know the preference of a child) which among all her playmates Gilberte liked the best, Mme Swann replied: "But you ought to know a great deal better than I do, since you're in her confidence, the great favourite, the crack, as the English say."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 578

This is a sweet little passage, although one that is also, as is so often the case in Remembrance of Things Past, hinting at deeper issues, right before one of my favorite passages from Proust (which, truthfully, I'm still processing - although this discussion is more than a variation on the old North Carolina four corner stall technique).

I love that Proust imagined Gilberte before he ever met her, and not simply because he did so because we often fabricate our perfect love before we ever know them tangibly (and, of course, they always turn out to be something completely different), but because he placed her in his imagination in actual places.  There is a Dar Williams song entitled I'll Miss You Till I Meet You which serves as a lovely and sad reflection on love affairs that haven't happened yet.  I wonder if he placed her "in front of a church, in a landscape of the Ile-de France" because this was one of his favorite places, so of course his great love would be there.  Since perception is saturated with emotion then it makes sense that it would apply to perceptions we haven't experienced yet as well.  Later he moved from dreams to memories, and Gilberte was "embowered always in a hedge of pink hawthorn, in the little lane that I took when I was going the Meseglise way."  One of the reasons why students are always so shocked to see their professors out and about in the world - beyond fear that we might, as in class, start quizzing them or pestering them about their missing paper - is that we exist in their memories in the classroom, so that we, like the bored ghosts in Wings of Desire, are trapped there.  We certainly do the same thing with the memories of those dear to us, especially our loves.  Although my ex-fiancee Laura and I traveled quite a bit when we were together, I guess she lives in my imagination in her apartment in Abu Dhabi, mainly because we spent so much time there but also because some of my fondest memories are all the trips we made to bloody IKEA to pick out furniture for her flat.  Maybe our loves continue to live in cherished places because it keeps them safe and warm, but also because we still love them so much that we trust them to remain guardians of our most precious memories.