My Years With Proust - Day 534

When I fell asleep in a certain way I used to wake up shivering, thinking that I had caught the measles, or, what was far more painful, that my grandmother (of whom I no longer ever thought) was hurt because I had mocked her that day at Balbec when in the belief that she was about to die, she had wished me to have a photography with her. At once, although I was awake, I felt that I must go and explain to her that she had misunderstood me.  But already my bodily warmth was returning.  The diagnosis of measles was set aside, and my grandmother was so far away that she no longer made my heart ache.  Sometimes over these different kinds of sleep a sudden darkness fell.  I was afraid to continue my walk along an entirely unlighted avenue, where I could hear prowling footsteps.  Suddenly an argument broke out between a policeman and one of those women whom one often saw driving hackney carriages, and mistook at a distance for young coachmen.  Upon her box among the shadows I could not see her, but she was speaking, and in her voice I could read the perfections of her face and the youthfulness of her body.  I stroke towards her, in the darkness, to get into her carriage before she drove off.  It was a long way. Fortunately, her argument with the policeman was prolonged.  I overtook the carriage which was still stationary.  This part of the avenue was lighted by street lamps.  The driver became visible.  It was indeed a woman, but large and old and corpurlent, with white hair tumbling beneath her cap, and a strawberry mark on her face.  I walked past her, thinking: "Is this what happens to the youth of women? If we have a sudden desire to see those we have met in the past, have they grown old?  Is the young woman we desire like a character on the stage when, through the defection of the actress who created the part, the management is obliged to entrust it to a new star?  But then it is no longer the same."

   Then I would be overcome with a feeling of sadness.  We have thus in our sleep countless images of pity, like Renaissance Pieta's, not, like them, wrought in marble, but on the countrary unsubstantial.  They have their purpose, however, which is to remind us of a more compassionate, more humane view of things, which we are too apt to forget in the icy common sense, sometimes full of hostility, of the waking state.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 120-121

Proust is in the middle of a, typically, pages-long description and analysis of a dream.  Oddly, he doesn't really spend that much time in the dream world in Remembrance of Things Past, unless you consider that the entire novel is spent in the dream world.  There's normally a point in most works where one of the characters has a dream that provides key information or a different viewpoint because they've entered the world of the irrational/instinctual/emotional and left the constraints of irrationality behind.  It allows the protagonist to stop and see the world in a different way, to look longer and deeper. It could be argued (although I wouldn't make the argument passionately) that the entirety of Remembrance of Things Past in one long dream in that way.  At the same time, considering that Proust was writing at the high point of Freud's influence in the public imagination that dreams are not used more frequently as a mechanism in the writing.

As part of the dream Proust recounts this segment: "The driver became visible.  It was indeed a woman, but large and old and corpurlent, with white hair tumbling beneath her cap, and a strawberry mark on her face.  I walked past her, thinking: 'Is this what happens to the youth of women? If we have a sudden desire to see those we have met in the past, have they grown old? . . '" I'm including this section because I think it foreshadows a key section from the end of the novel, as well as, obviously, forming a metaphor for the passing of time.  He then continues the thought with, " . . Is the young woman we desire like a character on the stage when, through the defection of the actress who created the part, the management is obliged to entrust it to a new star?  But then it is no longer the same."  As we grow older and, well, I'm old, do we start looking for a new actress to to play the character of our life on stage?  I'm not talking about finding a younger partner, although that happens readily enough in a misguided attempt to tackle the ethereal with the more tangible.  And, yes, I suppose I was guilty of this with the LBG, although to be fair one of the biggest obstacles in the early stages of the relationship (and maybe the later) was my very conscious fear of doing exactly that. Rather, I'm thinking more about our life and the need to somehow make it new again. My friends are familiar (and sick to death) with my theory of recreating yourself every five years, and I think I've done this so consistently maybe I won't be looking to change the metaphorical actress on the stage as a tool to maintain the plot, at least as dramatically as I might otherwise.  I keep signing my life to short-term contracts.

In light of yesterday's actions at Charlottesville I guess it's not surprising that the final section jumped out at me so forcibly: "Then I would be overcome with a feeling of sadness.  We have thus in our sleep countless images of pity, like Renaissance Pieta's, not, like them, wrought in marble, but on the country unsubstantial.  They have their purpose, however, which is to remind us of a more compassionate, more humane view of things, which we are too apt to forget in the icy common sense, sometimes full of hostility, of the waking state."  We seem to have become a country without pity, a country in desperate need of something to "remind us of a more compassionate, more humane view of things . ."  Why do we not have any pity?  It's easy to blame Donald Trump, although he is a festering symptom more than the root cause of the disease itself; much as it's wrong to say that America is racist because of Trump, when, in fact, he was elected because we are racist.  Rather, he's just making it worse, both in regards to racism and the lack of pity.  I'd love to blame capitalism, I do think it's a scourge.  When you commodify everything you dehumanize the world.  A popular theory would be that we have lost any sense of pity because of our lack of a spiritual foundation, which seems like a more logical answer as long as we don't simply equate it with belonging to a religion, since way too many American Christians possess absolutely no pity (such as the moronic adviser to Trump who opined that God had signed off on our mad king bombing South Korea).  At times I wonder if there is something inherently wrong with Christianity itself, or at least in the Christianity that is popular in mega-churches throughout the US in the 21st century.  How do you take the teachings of Jesus, especially the Sermon on the Mount, and turn it into a worldview lacking pity?  Modern Christianity, at least that practiced by too many Americans today, asks less of its followers on a daily basis than any religion in the world.  Instead, it's tied to one person dying, and being reborn, two thousand years ago - and a person who died for everyone's sins.  It's a lovely vision, but also one that, if viewed incorrectly, can justify a more external view of faith; one that allows you to not take the humanity of our fellow humans into account because it's all been taken care of by someone else.  This might all relate to the fact that we, especially white Americans, live in actual or metaphoric gated communities, with America in the age of walls and Muslim bans being the ultimate gated community.  Over the years I've often told my students that we are a land without shame. and that all of us will do anything, and happily admit to it, as long as we can be popular or famous on TV or the Internet.  The post-Confucian scholar Mencius proposed that the most important section of the heart (read mind) was the Heart of Shame, and without shame we were incapable of intellectual or moral improvement.  If we lack the capacity for shame then I would argue we've lost one of the key factors in pity.  Like most problems, our lack of pity as a nation is a combination of factors. No matter the cause, what will serve as our symbol to "remind us of a more compassionate, more humane view of things . ." In light of yesterday it would be easy, and incorrect, to think it will be that image of those poor people flying over the speeding car of the cowardly White Supremacist, but we, sadly, don't learn that easily, and we've had (and will have) countless other tragedies as exemplars.  Instead, we need something, as Proust tells us, "unsubstantial," or we might today we insubstantial, or at least intangible.  In a previous post I've discussed how in my faith we're always taught to meet the worse with the better.  Sounds simple, if only it were.

Arguably the most famous pieta, the one carved by the young Michelangelo.

I've always liked this one better, the one Michelangelo carved when he was eighty.  I have no doubt that one understands pity better at eighty than at twenty-five. Maybe pity grows from an understanding of human frailty, which you certainly understand more clearly with the passing of time.

However, Michelangelo did not have a monopoly on the production of pietas.  Here's one by Bellini. As a species we seem to be much better at producing symbols of pity than actually displaying pity.