She was not, moreover, frivolous, read a great deal when she was alone, and read aloud to me when we were together. She had become extremely intelligent. She would say, quite falsely in fact: "I'm appalled when I think that but for you I should still be quite ignorant. Don't contradict. You have opened up a world of ideas to me which I never suspected, and whatever I may have become I owe entirely to you."
It will be remembered that she had spoken in similar terms of my influence over Andree. Had either of them a real feeling for me? And, in themselves, what were Albertine and Andree? To know the answer, I should have to immobilise you, to cease to live in that perpetual state of expectancy ending always in a different presentment of you, I should have to cease to love you in order to fix your image, cease to be conscious of your interminable and always disconcerting arrival, O girls, O successive rays of the swirling vortex wherein we throb with emotion in seeing you reappear while barely recognising you, in the dizzy velocity of light. We might perhaps remains unaware of that velocity, and everything would seem to us motionless, did not a sexual attraction set us in pursuit of you, O drops of gold, always dissimilar and always surpassing our expectation! Each time, a girl so little resembles what she was the time before (shattering, as soon as we catch sight of her, the memory that we had retained of her and the desire that we had proposed to gratify), that the stability of nature which we ascribe to her is purely fictitious and a convention of speech. We have been told that some pretty girl is tender, loving, full of the most delicate feelings. Our imagination accepts this assurance, and when we behold for the first time, beneath the woven girdle of her golden hair, the rosy disc of her face, we are almost afraid that this too virtuous sister, cooling our ardour by her very virtue, can never be to us the lover for whom we have been longing. What secrets, however, we confide to her from the first moment, on the strength of that nobility of heart, what plans we make together! But a few days later, we regret that we were so confiding, for the rosy-cheeked girl, at our second meeting, addresses us in the language of a lascivious Fury. As for the successive facts which after pulsating for some days the roseate light, now eclipsed, presents to us, it is not even certain that a momentum external to these girls has not modified their aspect, and might well have happened with my band of girls at Balbec. People extol to us the gentleness, the purity of a virgin. But afterwards they feel that something more spicy would please us better, and recommend her to show more boldness. In herself was she one more than the other? Perhaps not, but capable of yielding to any number of different possibilities in the headlong current of life.
Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 58-59
Proust asks a seemingly simple question, which has far broader implications. He wants to know if either Andree or Albertine actually had true feelings for him, and he attempts to answer it scientifically: "To know the answer, I should have to immobilise you, to cease to live in that perpetual state of expectancy ending always in a different presentment of you, I should have to cease to love you in order to fix your image . . " If he's going to place the girls under a microscope he needs a clean sample, which is difficult because, beyond the obvious fact that life is distressingly dirty, and more importantly for him, he needs a static, pure, unchanging, essential sample. And how does we acquire this sample for analysis when each of us changes so dramatically day to day. Proust continues, "Each time, a girl so little resembles what she was the time before (shattering, as soon as we catch sight of her, the memory that we had retained of her and the desire that we had proposed to gratify), that the stability of nature which we ascribe to her is purely fictitious and a convention of speech." While reading this passage I kept thinking about Heraclitus proposing, or at least Plato remembering that Heraclitus proposed, that you can never step in the same stream twice. The only constant is change. Think of the women in your life: "People extol to us the gentleness, the purity of a virgin. But afterwards they feel that something more spicy would please us better, and recommend her to show more boldness. In herself was she one more than the other? Perhaps not, but capable of yielding to any number of different possibilities in the headlong current of life." How could Proust answer the question of whether Albertine or Andree truly felt anything for him when they were a different person on the morrow? And to the core of everything, how can anyone love anyone else if neither of you will actually exist tomorrow? Maybe the problem is trying to decipher something as ineffable as love scientifically. Maybe Sherwood Anderson was right in Winesburg, Ohio when he noted that love was the divine accident of life.
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