"By the way, Judge Toureuil and his wife told me they had been to lunch with Mme Bontemps. They asked me no questions. But I seemed to gather from what was said that a marriage between you and Albertine would be the joy of her aunt's life. I think the real reason is that they are all extremely fond of you. At the same time the style in which they imagine that you would be able to keep her, the sort of connexions they more of less know that we have - all that is not, I fancy, entirely irrelevant, although it may be a minor consideration. I wouldn't have mentioned it to you myself, because I'm not keen on it, but as I imagine they'll mention it to you, I thought I'd get a word in first." "But you yourself, what do you think of her?" I asked my mother. "Well, I'm not the one who's going to marry her. You could certainly do a great deal better in terms of marriage. But I feel that your grandmother would not have liked me to influence you. As a matter of fact, I can't say what I think of Albertine; I don't think of her. All I can say to you is, like Madame de Sevigne: 'She has good qualities, or so I believe. But at this first stage I can praise her only by negatives. She is not this: she has not the Rennes accent. In time, I shall perhaps say: she is that.' And I shall always think well of her if she can make you happy." But by these very words which left it to me to decide my own happiness, my mother had plunged me into that stage of doubt in which I had been plunged long ago when, my father having allowed me to go to Phedre and, what was more, to take up writing as a career, I had suddenly felt myself burdened with too great a responsibility, the fear of distressing him, and that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 958-959
Whoops, Marcel's mother just told him what she really thinks of Albertine, which I suppose anyone could have seen coming. And she did it cleverly, both stating her opinion by quoting Madame de Sevigne and also leaving him with the misguided assumption that he now has the freedom to make up his mind, and feeling the weight of the responsibility. He compares it to the anxiety he felt when his father allowed him to attend the theatre.
What intrigues me is the concluding line when he speaks of "that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal." I'm immediately thinking back to the Devo line, which I'm paraphrasing, about how we have freedom of choice, although what we want is freedom from choice. All this, of course, makes me think of the Turkish election today, and another country moving away towards authoritarian rule, and that maybe democracy was just a moment in time, a beautiful dream, whose time has increasingly come and gone. Here in the US Trump belittles the rule of law and strips away individual liberties, except for the rich, almost on a daily basis. I guess what is most troubling is not that there are people who want to do this, but rather the great mass of people who seem quite happy to have them do it. As Proust tells us, this is "the only life that any of us has at his disposal," so why are we so happy to hand it over to someone else, especially someone who shares almost nothing with us. Obviously, marriage or any other relationship is its own form of tyranny, although tyranny with a velvet glove, but at least in a relationship you're paid off with orgasmic coin, occasionally, and can pretend that the other person has something in common with you.
No comments:
Post a Comment