My Year With Proust - Day 364

   Although I was still incapable of feeling a renewal of physical desire, Albertine was beginning nevertheless to inspire in me a desire for happiness.  Certain dreams of shared affection, always hovering within us, readily combine, by a sort of affinity, with the memory (provided that this has already become slightly vague) of a woman with whom we have taken our pleasure.  This sentiment recalled to me aspects of Albertine's face more gentle, less gay, quite different from those that would have been evoked by physical desire; and as it was also less pressing than that desire, I would gladly have postpone its realisation until the following winter, without seeking to see Albertine again at Balbec before her departure.  But, even in the midst of a grief that is still acute, physical desire will revive.  From my bed, where i was made to spend hours every day resting, I longed for Albertine to come and resume our former amusements.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 810-811

Marcel wants to be miserable.  He feels that he would be unfaithful to the memory of his grandmother by feeling joy, so he tried, as we saw yesterday, to recall his most sorrowful moment, to bring him back to the purity of his suffering, but he can't seem to do it.  Life will find a way, even if it's just physical desire, to remind you why we're here, and we're not here to be miserable.  I've talked about the months after I left home, when I was living in my office, the period I always refer to as my monastic phase, when I was so determined to wear my hair shirt inside outside and intensify my misery, and mollify my guilt.  And then one day I went to the Vermont Pub & Brew and sat at the bar and had a beer, and ran into one of my ex-students, Bill Wixon, who helped draw me out of my self-imposed exile.  In the Quran the point is made that God desires for you what is easy and not what is hard, and while this specifically relates to the question of faith, I think it also applies to the road we walk through life.  We shouldn't be mindless of the world around us, and we should certainly take our responsibilities, both person and professional seriously, but I think we're put on their earth to experience joy, in many forms, and to provide joy to others.  Life will find a way.