"No matter which of my friends of the little band I thought of, how could the last face that she had shown me not have been the only one that I could recall, since, of our memories with respect to a person, the mind eliminates everything that does not concur with the immediate purpose of our daily relations (even, and especially, if those relations are impregnated with an element of love which, ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come)? It allows the chain of spent days to slip away, holding on only to the very end of it, often of a quite different metal from the links that have vanished in the night, and in the journey which we make through life, counts as real only the place in which we are at present. My very earliest impressions, already so remote, could not find any remedy in my memory against the daily distortion to which they were subjected; during the long hours which I spent in talking, eating, playing with those girls, I did not even remember that they were the same pitiless and sensual virgins whom I had seen, as in a fresco, file past between me and the sea."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 1012
Proust once again touches upon the power and immediacy of memory, but also its maddening malleability. However, what's jumping out at me at this moment is his statement: ". . . if those relations are impregnated with an element of love which, ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come." Now, if a love is unsatisfied, which could either mean unrequited or at least not consummated, then I then I think that you are, by definition, always living in the moment about to come. But what if the love is unsatisfied simply because you're not satisfied? You're not simply mooning over the other person, and the love is consummated, both emotionally and physically, but you're not satisfied in the relationship. To me, if this is the situation you find yourself in then you're doubtless living in the moment yet to come even more than before the relationship was ever a relationship or before it was ever consummated. Here you have the "normal" anticipation and desire and frustration related to an unfulfilled emotional and sexual release, the very things that leave you focused on the moment yet to come, but you also add to it another driving factor: the dream of not being in the relationship, where the moment yet to come promises something very different. And this got me thinking - aren't all loves unsatisfied? Granted, one of my huge problems is an inability to live in the moment, but upon self-reflection it seems like every relationship I've ever had has been dominated by "the moment that is about to come." So, this might be a purely individual and personal flaw, and helps explain why I'm such a lousy partner. Or, maybe the truth is that all loves, even healthy ones, are unsatisfied? I remember seeing a TedTalk by Helen Fisher once where she and her team had put a whole bunch of folks who had just been dumped in an MRI machine (yes, as I've always said, scientists are just cruel; a larger version of the kid who pulled the wings off flies). They were trying to get a clearer handle on the chemical changes in the brain caused by love. One of the many interesting points she makes in the talk is that when we're in love we're in a constant state of need; we crave the other person. The irony is that when we've been dumped our friends, when trying to be helpful, encourage us to think with our brains instead of our hearts, but, of course, the reality is that it's the brain which is playing these horrible chemical tricks on us as part of its long-term evolutionary plan. In my mind (although if we can't trust other brains I don't know why we'd trust mine) this just proves my point: all loves is unsatisfied. We always need more time and intimacy and sex, and if we don't, if we're truly "satisfied", then it's probably not much of a relationship and more of a well-chosen roommate.
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