My Years With Proust - Day 521

   Sweet, gay, innocent moments to all appearance, and yet moments in which there gathers the unsuspected possibility of disaster, which makes the amorous life the most precarious of all, that in which the unpredictable rain of sulphur and brimstone falls after the most radiant moments, whereupon, without having the heart or the will to draw a lesson from our misfortune, we set to work at once to rebuild upon the slopes of the crater from which nothing but catastrophe can emerge.  I was as carefree as everyone who imagines that his happiness will last.  It is precisely because this tenderness has been necessary to give birth to pain - and will return moreover at intervals to calm it - that men can be sincere with each other, and even with themselves, when they pride themselves on a woman's lovingness, although, taking things all in all, at the unavowed to the rest of the world, or revealed unintentionally by questions and inquiries, a painful disquiet.  But this could not have come to birth without the preliminary tenderness, which even afterwards is intermittently necessary to make the pain bearable and to avoid ruptures; and concealment of the secret hell that a life shared with the woman in question really is, to the point of parading an allegedly tender intimacy, expresses a genuine point of view, a universal process of cause and effect, one of the modes whereby the production of grief and pain is rendered possible.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, p. 75

I feel that this passage exists somewhere between the Drive-By Truckers' Women Without Whiskey, Neil Young's Barstool Blues, and Percy Sledge's When a Man Loves a Woman.

Proust reflects upon the inevitability of pain in any relationship with a woman, but also, concomitantly, the inevitability of wisdom. Months ago we talked about the fact that in the happiest moment there lurked beneath the surface the unexpected cataclysmic disaster.  If anything he's now more certain of heartbreak, made more cruel that it is hidden by blissful moments: "Sweet, gay, innocent moments to all appearance, and yet moments in which there gathers the unsuspected possibility of disaster, which makes the amorous life the most precarious of all, that in which the unpredictable rain of sulphur and brimstone falls after the most radiant moments . . ."  If men were honest with themselves, and each other, they'd admit that this was the reality of all things, although they usually aren't - at least this is self-evident to Proust. As I once had a character say in a rightfully discarded novel, "Sadly, knowledge brings pain, but, thankfully, pain brings knowledge."