Sometimes indeed the human voice was added to that music. Albertine would murmur a few words. How I longed to catch their meaning! It would happen that the name of a person of whom we had been speaking and who had aroused my jealousy would come to her lips, but without making me unhappy, for the memory that it brought with it seemed to be only that of the conversations that she had had with me on the subject. One evening, however, when with her eyes still shut she half awoke, she said tenderly, addressing me: "Andree." I concealed my emotion. "You're dreaming, I'm not Andree," I said to her, smiling. She smiled also: "Of course not, I wanted to ask you what Andree said to you this evening." "I assumed that you must be used to lying beside her like that." "Oh no, never," she said. But, before making this reply, she had hidden her face for a moment in her hands. So her silences were merely screens, her surface affection merely kept beneath the surface a thousand memories which would have rent my heart, her life was full of those incidents the good-natured, bantering account of which forms one's daily gossip at the expense of other people, people who do not matter, but which, so long as a woman remains buried in the depths of one's heart, seem to us so precious a revelation of her life that, for the privilege of exploring that underlying world, we would gladly sacrifice our own. Then her sleep would seem to me a marvellous and magic world in which at certain moments there rises from the depths of the barely translucent element the avowal of a secret which we shall not understand. But as a rule, when Albertine was asleep, she seemed to have recaptured her innocence. In the attitude which I had imposed upon her, but which in her sleep she had speedily made her own, she seemed to trust herself to me. Her face had lost any expression of cunning or vulgarity, and between herself and me, towards whom she raised her arm, on whom she rested her hand, there seemed to be an absolute surrender, an indissoluble attachment. Her sleep moreover did not separate her from me and allowed her to retain the consciousness of our affection; its effect was rather to abolish everything else; I would kiss her, tell her that I was going to take a turn outside, and she would half-open her eyes and say to me with a look of surprise - for the hour was indeed late - "But where are you off to, my darling -------" (calling me by my Christian name), and at once fall asleep again. Her sleep was no more than a sort of blotting out of the rest of her life, an even silence over which from time to time familiar words of tenderness would pass in their flight. By putting these words together, one might have arrived at the unalloyed conversation, the secret intimacy of a pure love.
Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 109-110
Proust continues to ruminate on Albertine sleep, or, more accurately, his response to Albertine sleeping. A couple of years ago Catherine and Caitlin, two of my all-time favorite students (although I could never tell them that, for the obvious reasons) prepared a Survival Guide for future Scudder students. In it, they provided the essential rule for success in my class, and, well, for life itself (as well as the absolute quintessence of perception, so maybe they learned something after all): "When you think there's no deeper meaning, you're wrong. Look harder." And maybe this is why I love Proust so much. For all intents and purposes Proust said to himself, "I'm going to follow this memory down the rabbit hole and I will not stop digging until I reach the end, even if I have to borrow all the way through the planet - oh, and I think there are also a lot of other related perceptions and memories that I need to track down, so this may take a while." I'm tweaking Proust, because, well, he's dead, and can't do anything about it, but what he undertook is a remarkably beautiful thing, and it's why there will never be an age when Proust will not be read. Sadly, Remembrance of Things Past will be read by a smaller and smaller percentage of the population, which also justifies me making my first year students read a couple short passages, because, as Catherine and Caitlin opined, it is essential to "Be less stupid." In an age when we exist almost entirely on the surface level, and when we communicate through shared memes and 140 character rants (and, yes, I get the irony of that statement since I live on Twitter; I'm praying for a post-Trump age when I will be drawn less magnetically and urgently online to keep track of what our mad king is doing), reading Proust forces you to slow down and to concentrate and to analyze and to, well, think, which is in desperate short supply these days. I've talked before about the concept of the NMI, the New Monastic Individual, and maybe in the future the secret handshake for membership will be the ability to speak knowingly about Proust.
We've talked so often about inspired Marcel's love for Albertine (which shows that we as a species never truly learn anything because why do we keep trying to define the ineffable?); is it carnal or is it simply about power or it is a desire to somehow capture the love and affection of someone (bringing us back to the opening scene of him lying in his bed hoping against hope that his mother would steal away to see him for a few moments) or the purity of his grandmother's love (reflecting back on that heartbreaking memory of him tapping on the wall that separated them). I'm more and more learning towards the purity aspect, not simply in regard to his grandmother's love but more generally. Think of the passage above. It starts off with his usual jealous passive-aggressive mania, this time focusing on the fact that she whispered Andree's name in her sleep, but then passes on to more dispassionate observations. Proust suggests, "But as a rule, when Albertine was asleep, she seemed to have recaptured her innocence" In so doing has she recaptured her purity? And, more importantly in this context, has Marcel recaptured his innocence/purity? Proust is also, obviously, fascinated with beauty, but is beauty just another, more tangible, version of purity? In an increasingly ugly, violent, bestial world, aren't we all - or at least the more intelligent, sensitive souls among us - seeking out those little increasingly brief moments of beauty/purity? In turn, is this what brings us back to Proust?
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