My Year With Proust - Day 163

   "Meanwhile my grandmother, because I now showed a keen interest in golf and tennis and was letting slip an opportunity of seeing at work and hearing talk an artist whom she knew to be one of the greatest of his time, evinced for me a contempt which seemed to me to be based on somewhat narrow views.  I had guessed long ago in the Champs-Elysees, and had verified since, that when we are in love with a woman we simply project on to her a state of our own soul; that consequently the important thing is not the worth of the woman but the profundity of the state; and that the emotions which a perfectly ordinary girl arouses in us can enable us to bring to the surface of our consciousness some of the innermost parts of our being, that might be evoked by the pleasure we derive from the conversation of a great man or even from the admiring contemplation of his work."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 891-892

Proust's grandmother is getting frustrated with him because he is spending his time playing tennis or gold instead of taking the opportunity to spend time with the painter Elstir (who we'll meet in more detail shortly).  As you might suppose, Proust was never much of a sports guy, but these diversions increased the chances that he would encounter "the tribe."  As he tells us, "I loved none of them, loving them all, and yet the possibility of meeting them was in my daily life the sole element of delight, alone aroused in me those hopes for which one would break down every obstacle . . ."

So why was Proust so in love with all of them, which mean, of course, that he wasn't in love with any of them.  He proposes that "when we are in love with a woman we simply project on to her a state of our own soul; that consequently the important thing is not the worth of the woman but the profundity of the state."  Once again Proust is ruminating on the deeply personal, and I think in some ways onanistic, nature of love.  So, the people who have great love affairs are the people capable of having great love affairs, which I guess also means that the people who have painful tragic love affairs are designed to have painful tragic love affairs.  On some level I think we know this to be true, which is why we always try to exoticize and magnify our love affairs.