My Year With Proust - Day 344

   Swann left me without shaking hands so as not to be forced into a general leave-taking in this room which swarmed with his friends, but said to me" "You ought to come and see your friend Gilberte.  She has really grown up now and altered, you wouldn't know her.  She would be so pleased!" I no longer loved Gilberte.  She was for me like a dead person for whom one has long mourned, and then forgetfulness has come, and if she were to be resuscitated would no longer fit into a life which has ceased to be fashioned for her.  I no longer had any desire to see her, not even that desire to show her that I not wish to see her which, every day, when I was in love with her, I vowed to myself that I would flaunt before when I loved her no longer.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 739

This touching scene between the dying Swann and Marcel concludes, with the former encouraging the latter to visit his daughter Gilberte.  I proposed before that if you were truly in love with someone then you are probably still in love with them, but that you've just reached a sense of distance and understanding and, well, peace with the fact that your future does not include them, and that I don't know if it's truly a case of not being in love anymore.  Or maybe it's better to say that you're no longer in the white hot flame of love with them anymore.  Proust, when writing about Gilberte, proposes, "She was for me like a dead person for whom one has long mourned, and then forgetfulness has come, and if she were to be resuscitated would no longer fit into a life which has ceased to be fashioned for her."  I think I would spin off of the "a life which has ceased to be fashioned for her" line to propose that we change so dramatically over time (I think the me at 57 is almost unrecognizable from the person I was at 50, and by now we should have locked into a pattern and the variations should be minor) that a person you madly loved in one age just doesn't "fit" into the changing environment, or, more importantly, the changing self - but that doesn't mean that you're not still in love with them.  As I've opined before, I think for each relationship there is a "sweet spot", both geographically and temporally, where that love still exists, and if you could go back to that place and time, and version of yourself, you would slide back into an active love affair quite easily.

Marcel is almost sad that, in not loving Gilberte anymore, he is robbed of the opportunity to show her that he doesn't love her anymore.  I suppose we've all felt that one time or another, but to me that is either an expression of extreme vanity or folly, wherein you are in the end only showing time that it exists.