My Year With Proust - Day 250

. . . My surplus of knowledge of life (life as being less uniform, less simple than I had at first supposed it to be) inclined me provisionally towards agnosticism.  What can one positively affirm, when the thing that one thought probable at first has then shown itself to be false and in the third instance turns out true?  (And alas, I was not yet at the end of my discoveries with regard to Albertine).

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, p. 375

Although I often find a tremendous sense of affinity with Marcel, I don't normally put myself in his place.  So, when he's philosophizing about the folly of lingering before the hawthorns I completely understand it - at least the quest, if not the answer.  If Proust is struggling with essential questions of beauty then by definition I'm doomed.  I don't often see myself in his (or Swann's) hopeless moping around over various and sundry women.  Rather, like all people who self-delusional souls who ignore the log in their own eyes while commenting on the specks in others, I pity my friends for somehow finding their way into Remembrance of Things Past.  However, in this case I'm clearly Marcel because I had/have my own perplexing long-term relationship, which was probable and then false and then true and will in the end doubtless stall out at probable.  I find it interesting that he said that the experience inclined him "provisionally towards agnosticism."  It led me to ask myself when I first realized that life was not certain or guaranteed?  And when I therefore became an emotional/intellectual atheist (believing that there was no meaning or purpose to love) - and when did I become certain that it is true (or will I ever realize it)?  I don't have the answer to these questions yet, but I am officially on the clock.