My Years With Proust - Day 479

I heard myself weeping.  But at that moment, to my astonishment, the door opened and, with a throbbing heart, I seemed to see my grandmother standing before me, as in one of those apparitions that had already visited me, but only in my sleep.  Was it all only a dream, then?  Alas, I was wide awake.  "You see a likeness to your poor grandmother," said Mamma, for it was she, speaking gently as thought to calm my fear, acknowledging however the resemblance, with a beautiful smile of modest pride which had always been innocent of coquetry. Her dishevelled hair, whose grey tresses were not hidden and strayed about her troubled eyes, her ageing cheeks, my grandmother's own dressing-gown which she was wearing, all these had for a moment prevented me from recognising her and she made me uncertain whether I was still asleep or my grandmother had come back to life.  For a long time past my mother had resembled my grandmother far more than the young and smiling Mamma of my childhood.  But I had ceased to think of this resemblance.  So it is, when one has been sitting reading for a long time, one's mind absorbed, not noticing how the sun was passing, that suddenly one sees round about one the sun that shone yesterday at the same hour call up the same harmonies, the same effects of colour that precede a sunset.  It was with a smile that my mother drew my attention to my error, for it was pleasing to her that she should bear so strong a resemblance of her mother.

   "I came," she said, "because while I was asleep I thought I heard someone crying.  It awakened me.  But how is it that you aren't in bed?  And your eyes are filled with tears.  What's the matter?"

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1166-1167

Once again the generations, and for that matter the past, flow past Marcel: his grandmother, his mother, and Albertine.  His crying over the sunset wakes up his mother, and when she walks into his room he sees her as his grandmother.  It's a mistake that actually pleases his mother: "It was with a smile that my mother drew my attention to my error, for it was pleasing to her that she should bear so strong a resemblance of her mother."  I think as we grow older we are either proud or horrified by our similarity, physical and emotional, to our parents, and it's clear that at this point in her life Marcel's mother is pleased with the similarity.  I keep coming to the reason why Marcel is so fixated on Albertine, and we've certainly discussed a number of theories.  In the end I wonder if he is simply because of his growing sense of his role in this generational parade, in that you fall in love or you get married (and sometimes actually both) because it's your turn to do so, not because you are naturally driven to do either.