Robert must have realised that I was not indifferent to Albertine, for he did not respond to her advances, which put her in a bad humour with myself; then he spoke to me as though I was alone, and this, when she noticed it, raised me again in her esteem. Robert asked me if I would like to try and find, among the friends with whom he used to take me to dine every evening at Doncierces when I was staying there, those who were still in the garrison. And as he himself indulged in that sort of teasing affectation which he reproved in others, "What's the good of your having worked so hard to charm them if you don't want to see them again?" he asked. I declined his offer, for I did not wish to run the risk of being parted from Albertine, but also because now I was detached from them. From them, which is to say from myself. We passionately long for there to be another life in which we shall be similar to what we have here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we once were, to what we wished to main immortally. Even without supposing that death is to alter us more completely than the changes that occur in the course of our lives, if in that other life we were to encounter the self that we have been, we should turn away from ourselves as from those people with whom we were once on friendly terms but whom we have not seen for years - such as Saint-Loup's friends whom I used so much to enjoy meeting every evening at the Faisan Dore, and whose conversation would now have seemed to me merely a boring importunity. In this respect, and because I preferred not to go there in search of what had given me pleasure in the past, a stroll through Doncieres might have seemed to me a prefiguration of an arrival in paradise. We dream much of paradise, or rather of a number of successive paradises, but each of them is, long before we die, a paradise lost, in which we should feel ourself lost too.
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 888
First off, this section reminds me of the Kathleen Edwards song Copied Keys, a song that is much more knowing and self-aware than she should have been able to write when she was that young.
Marcel and Albertine has unexpectedly come across Robert Saint-Loup, who suggests they go in search of some old friends. Proust tells us, " I declined his offer, for I did not wish to run the risk of being parted from Albertine, but also because now I was detached from them. From them, which is to say from myself." And maybe this particular passage is what first brought me to the Edwards song. You can easily lose touch with your friends and your world, and thus with yourself. I've talked before about the fact that one of the biggest challenges that I faced with lovely British girl was finding a universe where neither one of us depended upon copied keys, which is why our best options always focused on alternate locations such as Abu Dhabi or Hong Kong. While I would have missed my friends and my world tremendously, I suspect I could have more easily lived in London than she could have lived in Vermont, mainly because I'm older and I've enjoyed the company of my friends for many more years; essentially, I would have had more to draw on from the storehouse of memory.
Proust, typically, then launches into a much more philosophical rumination on life, specifically the life we are living and the life that we dream of living. This relates to both another imagined life running parallel to our own lived life (and this is something I'm perpetually guilty of) but also the next world (which, depending upon your own beliefs, might also qualify as an imagined world). "We passionately long for there to be another life in which we shall be similar to what we have here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we once were, to what we wished to main immortally" However, what does that other world, either the parallel one from this life or the next, even mean for us? As Edwards asks her lover, "would you even be the same?" More pressingly, would we even be the same? Proust proposes, "Even without supposing that death is to alter us more completely than the changes that occur in the course of our lives, if in that other life we were to encounter the self that we have been, we should turn away from ourselves as from those people with whom we were once on friendly terms but whom we have not seen for years . . ." Essentially, we would turn away from our friends, and we would even turn away from ourselves.
In the end, Marcel decides to not go in search of this lost world, this imagined world, this paradise, a paradise that was already lose. "In this respect, and because I preferred not to go there in search of what had given me pleasure in the past, a stroll through Doncieres might have seemed to me a prefiguration of an arrival in paradise. We dream much of paradise, or rather of a number of successive paradises, but each of them is, long before we die, a paradise lost, in which we should feel ourself lost too." I need to brood over this section more, which is why I'm planning on, upon completion, to go back and reread all of my commentary again and potentially add new reflections. I can't decide whether this is one of the saddest passages or one of the most hopeful passages; I am sure it is one of the most insightful passages.
As Proust reminds us, "In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we know little peace of mind."
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