My Year With Proust - Day 119

"Each evening, on arriving home, I reminded myself that I had things to say to Gilberte of prime importance, things upon which our whole friendship hung, and these things were never the same.  But at least I was happy, and no further menace arose to threaten my happiness.  One was to appear, alas, from a quarter in which I had never detected any peril, namely from Gilberte and myself.  And yet I should have been tormented by what, on the contrary, reassured me, by what I mistook for happiness.  We are, when we love, in an abnormal state, capable of giving at once to the most apparently simple accident, an accident which may at any moment occur, a seriousness which in itself it would not entail.  What makes us so happy is the presence in our hearts of an unstable element which we contrive perpetually to maintain and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not displaced.  In reality, there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralises, makes potential only, postpones, but which may at any moment become, what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we wanted, sheer agony."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 625-626

I'm coming to believe that if I had read Proust when I was younger I would have saved myself, theoretically, a lot of heartache.  The disclaimer "theoretically", is included, naturally, because I would not have listened, as none of us do when we're in love.  In this passage Proust is reflecting on his dysfunctional relationship with Gilberte, but I could have included myself and any number of women in here (with less commas and semi-colons, obviously).  Proust describes being in love as an "abnormal state," and have truer words ever been spoken?  Further, he identifies "the presence in our hearts of an unstable element."  If we're going to follow this analogy to its conclusion I guess we should ask whether this unstable element, love, is actually found in nature, but we'll leave that alone for now.  What interests me at this moment is that it takes us back to the question of why love fades. So, in the end is it the abnormality or the instability that makes love sublime, but which also makes it untenable?