My Years With Proust - Day 435

It was natural, and yet it was not without importance; they reminded me that it was my fate to pursue only phantoms, creatures whose reality existed to a great extent in my imagination; for there are people - and this had been my case since youth - for whom all the things that have a fixed value, assessable by others, fortune, success, high positions, do not count; what they must have is phantoms.  They sacrifice all the rest, devote all their efforts, make everything else subservient to the pursuit of some phantom.  But this soon fades away; then they run after another only to return later on to the first.  It was not the first time that I had gone in quest of Albertine, the girl I had seen that first year silhouetted against the sea. Other women, it is true, had been interposed between the Albertine whom I had first loved and the one whom I rarely left now; other women, notably the Duchesse de Guermantes.  But, the reader will say, why torment yourself so much with regard to Gilberte, why take such trouble over Mme de Guermantes, if, having become the friend of the latter, it is with the sold result of thinking no more of her, but only of Albertine?  Swann, before his death, might have answered the question, he who had been a lover of phantoms.  Of phantoms pursued, forgotten, sought anew, sometimes for a single meeting, in order to establish contact with an unreal life which at once faded away, these Balbec roads were full. When I reflected that their trees - pear trees, apple trees, tamarisks - would outlive me, I seemed to be receiving from them a silent counsel to set myself to work at last, before the hour of eternal rest had yet struck.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1045-1046

Proust notes, "It was not the first time that I had gone in quest of Albertine, the girl I had seen that first year silhouetted against the sea."  He admits that other women "had been interposed between the Albertine whom I had first loved and the one whom I rarely left now." What strikes me about his observation is the choice of the word silhouette.  Wouldn't Albertine, and for that matter every other woman he mentioned, remain a silhouette?  For that matter, doesn't every woman we ever love remain a silhouette (if Proust can't fill in the dark outline with color and nuance and texture what chance do I have?).  I know I've talked about a brilliant first year student self-portrait from several years ago where a young woman produced a photograph of herself completely silhouetted in front of her dorm window.  She appeared to be nude, and in her presentation and reflection, wise beyond her tender years, she proposed that isn't this how life is - even if you thought you knew her, possessed her, even saw her naked, you'd still only be seeing what she wanted to show you?  The rest would still remain hidden inside the silhouette.  So, does Albertine for Marcel - or, again, any woman for any of us - remain that eternal silhouette?  With what I'm sure had to be a painful admission, Proust tells us that "it was my fate to pursue only phantoms, creatures whose reality existed to a great extent in my imagination . . ."  He's not the only one, obviously, and he opines that Swann, by now dead, would have understood because he "had been a lover of phantoms."  Now, Proust is proposing that some people are doomed to chase phantoms and some are not, and I suppose there is truth in that.  It's like that moment when you learn from some guy that he is having all the sex that you wish you were having simply because he's the one who realized that woman are human beings, actual physical biological entities, and need sex as much as you do, whereas you'd elevated them to some mystic plain, turned them into phantoms, and were chasing them down the same tree-lined roads of imagination as Marcel.  "Of phantoms pursued, forgotten, sought anew, sometimes for a single meeting, in order to establish contact with an unreal life which at once faded away, these Balbec roads were full"

In the end I suppose you could ask the same question I always encourage my students to ask at the end of every assignment: so what?  Not "so what?" in that it doesn't matter, but rather what does it mean and why does it matter?  Proust made endless extraordinary observations about life and love and beauty and mortality and the fragile impermanence of all things, but does he ever get anything out of it?  Well, the answer is always yes because self-reflection is always a requirement for sentient beings, although seemingly in short supply in what passes for a US voter these days.  I would argue that it's especially important in this instance.  Proust tells us, "When I reflected that their trees - pear trees, apple trees, tamarisks - would outlive me, I seemed to be receiving from them a silent counsel to set myself to work on last, before the hour of eternal rest had yet struck."  In this instance Marcel's reflection on phantoms led him to a much more tangible reality and the reminder that time is passing, and that "to set myself to work at last."  I've shared that whenever I have a big project which I just can't seem to get energized to tackle I will set up Gauguin's Spirit of Death Watching as the wallpaper on my computer as the not so subtle - and certainly operating on a sub-Proustian level - reminder that I am not the one person who will get a divine dispensation to ignore the passing of years, and to set myself to work at last.