"'I think that Bergotte and my wife are both very hard on him,' came from Swann, who took the 'line,' in his own house, of being a plain, sensible man. 'I quite see that Norpois cannot interest you very much, but from another point of view,' (for Swann made a hobby of collecting scraps of 'real life') 'he is quite remarkable, quite a remarkable instance of a "lover"' When he was Counsellor in Rome,' he went on, after making sure that Gilberte could not hear him, 'he had a mistress here in Paris with whom he was madly in love, and he found time to make the double journey twice a week to see her for a couple of hours. She was, as it happens, a most intelligent woman, and remarkably beautiful then; she's a dowager now. And he has had any number of others since. I'm sure I should have gone stark made if the woman I was in love with lived in Paris and I had to be in Rome. Highly-strung people ought always to love, as the lower orders say, "beneath" them, so that their women have a material inducement to be at their disposal.
As he spoke, Swann realised that I might be applying this maxim to himself and Odette, and as, even among superior people, at the moment when they seem to be soaring with you above the plane of life, their personal pride is still basely human, he was overcome with profound irritation towards me. But it manifested itself only in the uneasiness of his glance. He said nothing to me at the time. Not that this need surprise us. When Racine (according to a story that is in fact apocryphal though its substance may be found recurring every day in Parisian life) made an illusion to Scarron in front of Louis XIV, the most powerful monarch on earth said nothing to that poet that evening. It was on the following day that he fell from grace.
But since a theory requires to be stated as a whole, Swann, after this momentary irritation, and after wiping his eyeglass, completed his thought in these words, words which were to assume later on in my memory an importance of a prophetic warning which I had not had the sense to heed: 'The danger of that kind of love, however, is that the woman's subjection calms the man's jealousy for a time but also makes it more exacting. After a while he will force his mistress to live like one of those prisoners whose cells are kept lighted day and night to prevent their escaping. And that generally ends in trouble.'"
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 606-607
This exchange takes place after a general disparagement of the character of M. de Norpois. Proust had shared that Norpois had treated him with contempt. Odette proposed that, "He's as dull as a wet Sunday," (a line which I will be stealing) while Bergotte concluded, "You see, has has to keep his mouth shut half the time so as not to use up all the stock of inanities that keep his shirt-front starched and his waistcoat white." Only Swann himself avoided the temptation to dog pile on Norpois, and instead spoke of his admirable passion for his mistresses. In the process he shares a philosophy which, he suddenly realized, might have applied to his own relationship with his wife Odette.
Swann suggested that, "Highly-strung people ought always to love, as the lower orders say, 'beneath' them, so that their women have a material inducement to be at their disposal." Immediately Swann realizes that anyone listening would make the obvious connection to his own relationship with Odette, although he then follows it up, because, as we know from any James Bond film or fantasy baseball draft, you always have to share your plans, by concluding that if a man is too jealous "he will force his mistress to live like one of those prisoners whose cells are kept lighted day and night to prevent their escaping. And that generally ends in trouble" - which also has a foreshadowing feel to it.
Logically or illogically, and the older I get I think they may actually be the same thing (just as in the Buddhist Heart Sutra the point is made the emptiness is form and form is emptiness), I began to think of the appropriate lover that a person should have. Unless you are going to let your mother pick out your mate, as we've discussed earlier, this doesn't really matter because the entire process if unpredictable and will follow its own mad path. I can't imagine a better match for me in regard to intelligence and shared experience than my ex-wife, but I also think we were unhappy a lot more than we were happy, and I'll take responsibility for most of it (essentially, I think we were best friends miscast as lovers, which made the breakup all the more painful because it left an especially big hole in our lives). At the same time I had seemingly nothing in common with my ex-fiancee Laura, but we had a pretty amazing year and a half together. So, who knows? Maybe what matters most is not intelligence and shared experience, but rather personality and temperament, which tends to transcend differences. What I've begun to realize through years of self-reflection, and especially during this time reading and considering Proust, is how difficult a person I am to have as a partner (I'm sure any girlfriend/wife/fiancee/lover I've ever had could have told you about it in tremendous detail and wish grim relish). I've come to realize that, much like the eponymous character that Mia Farrow played in Hannah and Her Sisters, I have tremendous needs, but few people see them, mainly because I do my best to hide them because I view them as a weakness - and I promote myself as a worthy partner because I am so so self-reliant and have so few needs, while secretly grousing over the fact that my partner is not fulfilling the needs I assured her I don't have. I will clearly die alone under a bridge somewhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment