In my fear lest the pleasure I found in this solitary excursion might weaken my memory of my grandmother, I sought to revive it by thinking of some great sorrow that she had experienced; in response to my appeal that sorrow tried to reconstruct itself in my heart, threw up vast pillars there; but my heart was doubtless too small for it, I had not the strength to bear so great a pain, my attention was distracted at the moment when it was approaching completion, and its arches collapsed before they had joined, as the waves crumble before reaching their pinnacle.
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 810
We now launch into "Part Two: Chapter Two" of Cities of the Plain. It's hard to imagine that Proust would ever need to prime the pump of memory, as I always imagine that he couldn't turn it off. When I had my first year students read sections of Proust they suggested that it must have been truly exhausting, if not painful, to be Proust, to see the world in that detail and to have a precise recall of memory that practically counted as an avalanche. In this instance he writes that he's concerned about forgetting his grandmother, or at least having the intensity of his memory of her waver, and thus he wants to think of some great sorrow and being it all back in to a precise view. However, in this instance he failed, as he explained, "but my heart was doubtless too small for it, I had not the strength to bear so great a pain." We've talked about how some suffering is just selfishness, an attempt to exoticize our own lives by emphasizing our own suffering - it's more about us than it is about the subject of our loss. Maybe his heart isn't too small. Rather, maybe he is choosing life and the larger world instead.
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