My Years With Proust - Day 371

   Next day, when Albertine wrote to me that she had only just got back to Egreville, and so had not received my note in time, and owuld come, if she might, to see me that evening, behind the words of her letter, as behind those that she had said to me once over the telephone, I thought I could detect the presence of pleasures, of people, whom she had preferred to me.  Once again, my whole body was stirred by the painful longing to know what she could have been doing, by the latent love which we always carry within us; I almost thought for a moment that it was going to bind me to Albertine, but it confined itself to a stationary throbbing, the last echo of which died away without the machine's having been set in motion.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 826

Marcel's jealousy of Albertine continues to grow, and I think everyone has had that phone call or email or actual physical letter wherein we detected that "presence of pleasures, of people, whom she had preferred to me."  What I really found interesting is Proust's comment of "the latent love which we always carry within us."  My excellent friend Cyndi and I, probably in the Cave Bar at Petra in Jordan, had a discussion once about whether or not there was truly one great love in our life and whether or not it was possible to love to people at the same time.  Not surprisingly (she is a right-thinking individual, after all) we were in complete agreement: probably not on the former, and definitely yes on the latter.  I've clearly been sincerely in love with two women at the same time, and although I may have loved them for different reasons, it didn't mean that one was necessarily more profound than the other - or that choosing one over the other would have been the "wrong" choice.  This bring us back to Proust's point about the "latent love which we always carry with in."  You could read it as the latent love he was carrying around for Albertine or more generally the latent love as in our more general, essential need to feel, receive and give love.  I do think this is an essential part of the human experience, which, I guess, begs the question of what triggers it with one woman and not another?  Yes, and now we're back to mystery.