My Years With Proust - Day 495

It was all the more dangerous because by nature I have always been more open to the world of potentiality than to the world of contingent reality.  This helps one to understand the human heart, but one is apt to be taken in by individuals.  My jealousy was born of mental images, to produce a specific suffering, not based on probability.  Now there may occur in the lives of men and of nations (and there was to occur in mine) a moment when we need to have within us a chief of police, a clear-sighted diplomat, a master-detective, who instead of pondering over the possible contingencies that extend to all the points of the compass, reasons sounds and says to himself: "If Germany announces this, it means that she intends to do something else, not just 'something' in the abstract but precisely this or that or the other, which she may perhaps have already begun to do," or "If so-and-so has fled, it is not in the direction of a or b or d, but to the point c, and to the place to which we must direct our search him is c." Alas, I allows this faculty, which was not highly developed in me, to grow numb, to lose strength, to disappear, by letting myself be lulled as soon as others were engaged in keeping watch on my behalf.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 16-17

"It was all the more dangerous because by nature I have always been more open to the world of potentiality than to the world of contingent reality."  I'm probably somewhere more in between these extremes than Marcel, as I've always felt that the battle that is routinely fought inside of me between the idealistic and the practical rivals Stalingrad.  That said, I probably lean more towards the "world of potentiality" as I am definitely a romantic.  I agree with Proust: "This helps one to understand the human heart, but one is apt to be taken in by individuals."

It's difficult to read his metaphoric line about the need for a far-sighted diplomat to foresee German (essentially affairs of the heart) actions without reflecting back on the shadow of war under which Proust wrote Remembrance of Things Past. This was hardly a random reference, but rather a sad comment on a threatening world war that would kill millions and begin the process of destroying European hegemony.