My Year With Proust - Day 220

   "The need for dreams, the desire to be made happy by the woman one has dreamed of, ensure that not much time is required before one entrusts all one's chances of happiness to someone who a few days since was no more than a fortuitous, unknown, insignificant apparition on the boards of a theatre."

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, p. 179

Proust continues to ruminate on his friend Robert's seemingly inexplicable fascination with Rachel.  What I like about this passage is that even though it is focusing on the allure of Rachel as an actress on a small theater, it works so effectively as a metaphor for all loves, especially the ones that fall into that maddening category of loves at first sight.  Rachel was a "fortuitous, unknown, insignificant apparition," but isn't that also true of every woman we've ever fallen in love with?  Nevertheless, eventually, and in many cases almost instantly, "one entrusts all one's chances of happiness" to this "apparition."  If you reverse engineer this passage I think it takes us to the greater truth.  We are all dominated by "the desire to be made happy by the woman one has dreamed of," but is that really because of the "need for dreams"?  That is, the dreams are not born from our love for a woman, but rather our love for her is a product of our need for dreams.  In the Accidental Mind Linden discusses the theory that love is essentially a biological trick played on you by the need to reproduce and rear that young creature with the slow-developing brain, wherein we are paid off in orgasmic coin (and, truthfully, what better coin is there?).  My students tend to love that theory, but then, at eighteen or nineteen, they love to wear the mask of world weary cynicism.  At an age when I should be world weary I am not, and I think Proust may be right.  We do need to dream, and doubtless the more conventional dream is that of love; we're still queuing up on payday, but it's just a different coin.