"With women who do not love us, as with the 'dear departed,' the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent us from continuing to wait. We live in expectancy, constantly on the alert; the mother whose son has gone to sea on some perilous voyage of discovery sees him in imagination every moment, long after the fact of his having perished has been established, striding into the room, saved by a miracle and in the best of health. And this expectancy, according to the strength of her memory and the resistance of her bodily organs, either helps her on her journey through the years, at the end of which she will be able to endure the knowledge that her son if no more, to forget gradually, and to survive his loss - or else it kills her.
At the same time, my grief found consolation in the idea that my love must profit by it. Every visit that I paid to Mme Swann without seeing Gilberte was painful to me, but I felt that it correspondingly enhanced the idea that Gilberte had of me.
Besides, if I always took care, before to see Mme Swann, to ensure that her daughter was absent, this arose not only from my determination to break with her, but no less perhaps from the ope of reconciliation which overlay my intention to renounce her (very few of such intentions are absolute, at least in a continuous form, in this human soul of ours, once of whose laws, confirmed by the unlooked-for wealth that memory supplies, is intermittance), and hid from me something of its cruelty. I knew how chimerical was this hope. I was like a pauper who moistens his dry cru with fewer tears if he assures himself that any any moment a total stranger is perhaps going to leave him his entire fortune. We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 635-636
One of the testaments of the greatness of Proust is that even during another lengthy exegesis on the pain of love (Swann's for Odette; his own for Gilberte; and I know enough of the story to know that there is more waiting in the near future) I know grow frustrated. I've often joked that halfway through The Sorrows of Young Werther I was volunteering to buy Werther a gun so that he could finish the job (having said that, I should really give it a re-read, because I read it in early graduate school and who knows what kind of mood was dominating me at that age). Proust does mention suicide in passing. "For, being free at any time to enter the house in which Gilberte lived, I constantly reminded myself, for all that I was firmly resolved to make no use of that privilege, that if ever my pain grew too sharp there was a way of making it cease." That's always the answer lurking in the back of so much of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, not as a preferred option but rather as the logical reality of the human existence. Instead, Proust survives by keeping the illusion of his love alive, including his extended "romance" with Mme Swann. "We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves."
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