My Years With Proust - Day 524

  And yet when, on the following day, Bloch sent me the photograph of his cousin Esther, I made haste to forward it to Aime.  And at the same moment I remembered that Albertine had that morning refused me a pleasure which might indeed have tired her.  Was that in order to reserve it for someone else, this afternoon, perhaps?  For whom?  Jealousy is thus endless, for even if the beloved, by dying for instance. can no longer provoke it by her actions, it may happen that memories subsequent to any event suddenly materialise and behave in our minds as though they too were events, memories which hitherto we had never explored, which had seemed to us unimportant, and to which our own reflexion upon them is sufficient, without any external factors, to give a new and terrible meaning.  There is no need for there to be two of you, it is enough to be alone in your room, thinking, for fresh betrayals by your mistress to come to light, even though she is dead.  And so we ought not to fear in love, as in every life, the future alone, but even the past, which often comes to life for us only when the future has come and gone - and not only the past which we discover after the event but the past which we have long kept stored within ourselves and suddenly learn how to interpret.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 81-82

In some ways this is simply another Proustian exegesis on the folly of jealousy, although it's one of my favorite ones for a couple reasons.  First off, I'd love to know exactly what this action entails: "And at the same moment I remembered that Albertine had that morning refused me a pleasure which might indeed have tired her." My interest in this is not simply prurient (well, at least not entirely simply prurient) because his fascination with Albertine's sex life, and whether or not she's having sex with a man or a woman, provides a window onto his personal motives and desires and manias.  He follows it up immediately by asking: "Was that in order to reserve it for someone else, this afternoon, perhaps?  For whom?"  While there is some universality to sexual acts, there are others that are more specifically situated inside gender lines (although as I'm writing these words I'm already starting to talk myself out of them, mainly because I'm usually suspicious of the purely binary in matters of sexual desire and performance).  What did he ask of her which she declined, which she would have then been perfectly willing to perform in the afternoon?  It seems to move us away from his manic jealousy in regards to her more sapphic desires, and bring us back to more ecumenical jealousy (I hope I'm the first and last person to ever use that ugly turn of phrase).  What's interesting/sad/maddening is that Proust understands the folly of his jealousy, and he says in a resigned fashion, "Jealousy is thus endless  . .", not simply because it's pointless but also because it never ends, which brings us to the other reason I like this section so much.  Proust is clearly dropping hints of future tragedies.  Within a couple sentences he tells us that "Jealousy is thus endless, for even if the beloved, by dying, for instance, can no longer provoke it by her actions . . ." and "There is no need for there to be two fo you, it is enough to be alone in your room, thinking, for fresh betrayals by your mistress to come to light, even thought she is dead."  [SPOILER ALERT]  Somehow, he still manages to end on a happier note, or at least a slightly more sanguine one, when he concludes: "And so we ought not to fear in love, as in every life, the future alone, but even the past, which often comes to life for us only when the future has come and gone - and not only the past which we discover after the event but the past which we have long kept stored within ourselves and suddenly learn how to interpret."  In the end we always have the past, even if we haven't figured out what it even means yet.