"People are very inquisitive. I've never been inquisitive, except when I was in love, and when I was jealous. And a lot I ever learned! Are you jealous?" I told Swann that I had never experienced jealousy, that I did not even know what it was. "Well, you can count yourself lucky. A little jealousy is not too unpleasant, for two reasons. In the first place, it enables people who are not inquisitive to take an interest in the lives of others, or of one other at any rate. And then it makes one feel the pleasure of possession, of getting into a carriage with a woman, of not allowing her to go about by herself. But that's only in the very first stages of the disease, or when the cure is almost complete. In between, it's the most agonising torment. However, I must confess that I haven't had much experience even of the two pleasures I've mentioned - the first because of my own nature, which is incapable of sustained reflexion; the second because of circumstances, because of the woman, I should say the women, of whom I've been jealous. But that makes no difference. Even when one is no longer attached to things, it's still something to have been attached to them; because it was always for reasons which other people didn't grasp. The memory of those feelings is something that's to be found only in ourselves; we must go back into ourselves to look at it. You mustn't laugh at this idealistic jargon, but what I mean to say is that I've been very fond of life and very fond of art. Well, now that I'm a little too weary to live with other people, those old feelings, so personal and individual, that I had in the past, seem to me - it's the mania of all collectors - very precious. I open my heart to myself like a sort of showcase, and examine one by one all those love affairs of which the rest of the world can have known nothing. And of this collection, to which I'm now even more attached than to my others, I say to myself, rather as Mazarin said of his books, but in fact without the least distress, that it will be tiresome to have to leave it all. But, to come back to my conversation with the Prince, I shall tell one person only, and that person is going to be you."
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 728-729
Swann, who definitely knows a thing or two about jealousy, reflects on the two reasons why jealosy is not too unpleasant. Swann proposes, "A little jealousy is not too unpleasant, for two reasons. In the first place, it enables people who are not inquisitive to take an interest in the lives of others, or of one other at any rate. And then it makes one feel the pleasure of possession, of getting into a carriage with a woman, of not allowing her to go about by herself." Essentially he is proposing that it makes people get out of their own lives and "take an interest in the lives of others." I don't know if I can completely agree with Swann here, because in most ways I would argue that jealousy is the very definition of self-absorption, mainly because it leads to his second point: you want to control the life of the other person. He's probably correct in that it makes you understand the fullness of other people's lives, even if you only realize that they have their own lives because you're fretting over them filling those independent hours with an affair with someone else. I guess it's a matter of degree; a little jealousy reflects love, while a lot expresses something darker. Maybe the most important word is "little."
Swann is at the end of his life and he possesses that wisdom which, cruelly, only seems to come to us when we have no time left to benefit from it. Swann reflects, "Well, now that I'm a little too weary to live with other people, those old feelings, so personal and individual, that I had in the past, seem to me - it's the mania of all collectors - very precious. I open my heart to myself like a sort of showcase, and examine one by one all those love affairs of which the rest of the world can have known nothing. And of this collection, to which I'm now even more attached than to my others, I say to myself, rather as Mazarin said of his books, but in fact without the least distress, that it will be tiresome to have to leave it all." In the end we are all collectors, and we certainly place much greater value on our treasures, in this particular case our love affairs, than anyone else will. It's why you will catch your friends, discreetly, rolling their eyes as you lament another failed love affair; no one really cares about your stamp collection.
I also find it interesting that Marcel claims to have never been jealous; he is conveniently forgetting his own ugly stretches of irrational jealousy.
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