My Year With Proust - Day 153

" . . . And La Bruyere tells us that that is everything: 'To be with the people one loves, to speak to them, not to speak to them, it is all the same.' He is right: that is the only true happiness.' added M. de Charlus in a mournful voice, 'and alas, life is so ill arranged that one very rarely experiences it.  Mme de Vegiene was after all less to be pitied that most of us.  She spent a great part of her life with the person whom she loved.'

   'You forget that it wasn't 'love' in her case, since it was her daughter.'

   'But what matters in life is not whom or what one loves,' he went on, in a judicial, peremptory, almost cutting tone, 'it is the fact of loving.  What Mme de Sevigne felt for her daughter has a far better claim to rank with the passion that Racine described in Andromaque or Phedre than the commonplace relations young Sevigne had with his mistresses.  It's the same with a mystic's love for his God.  the hard and fast lines with which we circumscribe love arise solely from our complete ignorance of life.'"

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 819

It's difficult to imagine improving upon these words by my generally witless commentary, so I should probably just stick to providing a little context.  Marie de Rabutin-Chantel, the Mme de Sevigne, was a seventeenth century French aristocrat known for her beautiful letters, which I have to admit, to my shame, that I know merely by reputation.  Her collected letters, most of which were written to her daughter over a period of thirty years, were published and are considered a classic of French literature (another gaping hole in my so-called education, and another reading project).  They were favorites of Proust's grandmother and his mother. She is famous for writing, "I know of no sorrow greater than that occasioned by a delay of the post." In an age where we are constantly and instantly linked up with folks via email and text and Twitter it's difficult to imagine what a letter meant to an earlier generation. Of course the medium all too often defines the message, and while we are constantly in contact it is surface-level reactive chatter, as compared to a more reasoned, reflective response that we've taken the time to prepare in a letter.  My excellent friend Sanford, a French scholar in his own right, will often ask people to write him actual, physical letters. I'm going to have to have a chat with him about Mme de Sevigne, which we may have to carry out via an actual exchange of letters.  Of course, I'm already starting to think of what I would like to tackle after I've finished reading and commenting on Proust, so maybe reading de Sevigne's letters would be an option.  I've also thought about delving more deeply into the Meditations or the Pillow Book.