My Year With Proust - Day 127

"There was a scene at home because I did not accompany my father to an official dinner at which the Bontemps were to be present with their niece Albertine, a young girl still hardly more than a child.  So it is that the different periods of our life overlap one another.  We scornfully decline, because of one whom we love and who will some day be of so little account, to see another who is of no account to-day, whom we shall love to-morrow, whom we might perhaps, had we consented to see her now, have loved a little sooner and who would thus have put a term to our present sufferings, bringing others, it is true, in their place."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 674

I decided to include this little snippet initially because it is the first mention of Albertine, who will play such a big role later.  However, it also made me think about the people, each on their own path, who pass through through our lives, sometimes intersecting and sometimes just flowing maddeningly close.  Somewhere I have notes set aside for a proposed novel tentatively entitled Comets, which explores that theme (although, because it is mine, it explores it clumsily and pretentiously and in the end unsatisfyingly). My great friend Jack and Julie Schultz went to Indiana University at exactly the same time, but never met each other until Brenda and I introduced them years later.  Now, IU is huge, so that makes sense, but how many times have we been at the same event or in the same room or standing in the same line with someone who would later play an extraordinary role in our lives?  We might have even made physical contact with them, bumped into them, and didn't it until later, if at all.  Think of the two trolley scenes from Doctor Zhivago, the first where Lara bumps into Yuri (with the requisite spark) and the second one years later where Yuri sees her but can't reach her.  As Proust suggests, if not for random fate we might have "loved a little sooner and who would thus have put a term to our present suffering, bringing others, it is true, in their place."  I've often joked that I was the second choice for almost everything that has happened in my life, which means that I was almost not there at that moment when I intercepted with a woman who I fell in love with, for probably was almost not there.  So, either it makes you believe in divine fate - that you were truly meant to be with that person - or that just the opposite is true, that there are innumerable possible lovers out there, and maybe we shouldn't take any of it too seriously.