My Years With Proust - Day 526

   More often than not, a body becomes the object of love only when an emotion, fear of losing it, uncertainty of getting it back, is merged into it.  Now this sort of anxiety has a great affinity for bodies.  It adds to them a quality which surpasses beauty itself, which is one of the reasons why we see men who are indifferent to the most beautiful women fall passionately in love with others who appear to us ugly.  To such beings, such fugitive beings, their own nature and our anxiety fasten wings.  And even when they are with us the look in their eyes seems to warn us that they are about to take flight.  The proof of this beauty, surpassing beauty itself, that wings add is that often, for us, the same person is alternately winged and wingless. Afraid of losing her, we forget all the others. Sure of keeping her, we compare her with those others whom at once we prefer to her.  And as these fears and these certainties may vary from week to week, a person may one week see everything that gave us pleasure sacrificed to her, in the following week be sacrificed herself, and so on for weeks and months on end.  All of which would be incomprehensible did we not know (from the experience, which every man shares, of having at least once in a lifetime ceased to love a woman, forgotten her) how very insignificant in herself a woman is when she is no longer - or is not yet - permeable to our emotions.  And, of course, if we speak of fugitive beings it is equally true of imprisoned ones, of captive women whom we think we shall never be able to possess.  Hence men detest procurresses, because they facilitate flight and dangle temptations, but if on the other hand we are in love with a cloistered woman, we willingly have recourse to a procuress to snatch her from her prison and bring her to us.  In so far as relations with women whom we abduct are less permanent than others, the reason is that the fear of not succeeding in procuring them or the dread of seeing them escape is the whole of our love for them and that once they have been carried off from their husbands, torn from their footlights, cured of the temptation to leave us, dissociated in short from our emotion whatever it may be, they are only themselves, that is to say next to nothing, and, so long desired, are soon forsaken by the very man who was so afraid of their forsaking him.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, p. 88

With the exception of her deplorable taste in men my ex-wife is a perceptive and thoughtful woman.  When discussing the vagaries of relationships she would often opine that the worse you treated the other person the better they liked you (I don't know whether that was an autobiographical admission or a well-placed accusation, although I suspect the latter was her intent and almost certainly the truth). Proust would almost certainly agree with her sage observation: "More often than not, a body becomes the object of love only when an emotion, fear of losing it, uncertainty of getting it back, is merged into it." He continues by suggesting that this "anxiety"  adds a quality to the bodies that "surpasses beauty itself."  The fact that this passage is littered with words such as captive, fugitive, imprisoned, flight and cloistral reinforces the message. While I don't know if my ex-wife's comments were auto-biographical, I'm absolutely certain that Proust's are far more auto-biographical than mere disinterested philosophical musings. Further more, Proust tells us, "To such beings, such fugitive beings, their own nature and our anxiety fasten wings.  And even when they are with us the look in their eyes seems to warn us that they are about to take flight."  Was it the look in Albertine's eyes, even more than her own actions, that gave her wings and made possession of her so necessary to Marcel's own existence?  In turn, was this what also drew Albertine to him, the impossibility of ever truly possessing him, of prying him out of his seclusion and his fortress of books and ideas?  Now, if I were wiser I'd be able to tell you if I truly loved the women I've loved because I noticed their wings and saw that look of escape in their eyes - and if the women who have loved me noticed my wings and saw that look of escape in my eyes.