It was not of course, as I was well aware, that I was the least bit in love with Albertine. Love is not more perhaps than the diffusion of those eddies which, in the wake of an emotion, stir the soul. Certain other eddies had indeed stirred my soul through and through when Albertine spoke to me at Balbec about Mlle Vinteuil, but these were now stilled. I no longer loved Albertine, for I no longer felt anything of the pains I had felt in the train at Baltec on learning how Albertine had spent her adolescence, with visits to Montjouvain, I had thought about all this for long enough, and it was now healed. But from time to time certain expressions used y Albertine made me suppose - why, I cannot say - that she must in the course of her life, short as it had been, have received many compliments, many declarations, and received them with pleasure, that is to say with sensuality. Thus she would say in any connexion: "Is that true? Is it really true?"
Marcel Proust, The Captive, p. 13
Marcel assures us, once again, that he is not "the least bit in love with Albertine." OK, I know we've heard this before. What is interesting to me here in this section is his definition of love. Proust proposes that, "Love is not more perhaps than the diffusion of those eddies which, in the wake of an emotion, stir the soul." The problem is that we assume that love is the emotion itself, but here Proust is assuring us that it is almost the reflection, the "diffusion of those eddies, in the wake of an emotion." I think we're hard-wired to believe that what he's describing is commitment or marriage, which is the sad, culturally approved shadow of love. It could well be that what's he's getting at is love as the cultural/societal phenomenon as compared to love the raw emotion.
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