My Years With Proust - Day 540

I was struck by how much reality there is in the work of Wagner as I contemplated once more those insistent, fleeting themes which visit an act, recede only to return detached, are at other moments, while remaining vague, so pressing and so close, so internal, so organic, so visceral, that they seem like the reprise not so much of a musical motif as of an attack of neuralgia.

   Music, very different in this respect from Albertine's society, helped me to descend into myself, to discover new things: the variety that I had sought in vain in life, in travel, but a longing for which was none the less renewed in me by this sonorous tide whose sunlit waves now came to expire at my feet.  A twofold diversity.  As the spectrum makes visible to us the composition of light, so the harmony of a Wagner, the colour of an Elstir, enable us to know that essential quality of another person's sensations into which love for another person does not allow us to penetrate.  Then a diversity inside the works itself, by the sole means that exist of being effectively diverse to wit, combining diverse individualities.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, p. 156

I don't know if I have anything profound to say about this passage (or any, for that matter), but it seemed remarkably well-timed as we start up Year Two of our Discography music discussion in a couple weeks.  Having included that disclaimer, why is it true that, as Proust writes, "Music, very different in this respect from Albertine's society, helped me to descend into myself, to discover new things: the variety that I had sought in vain in life, in travel, but a longing for which was none the less renewed in me by this sonorous tide whose sunlit waves now came to expire at my feet."? Why does music, that "sonorous tide," bring Proust (or most right-thinking individuals) to places that relationships (even with mysterious bisexual French women) cannot?  Certainly it relates to the emotional vibrancy of music. Granted, relationships, by definition, possess an emotional intensity.  Maybe the key here is the shelf life of the emotional intensity/vibrancy.  I can't imagine a time when I'll tire of hearing Neil Young's Helpless or Bill Evans's Young and Foolish or the Drive-By Truckers' Lookout Mountain or Cannonball Adderley's Somethin' Else or Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town or Miles Davis's Stella by Starlight or Uncle Tupelo's Looking for a Way Out or, well, it just goes on and on.  Sadly, however, we always tire of our relationships.  Why?  That would doubtless require a much more intelligent, perceptive person than me (not a particularly select fraternity) to answer, although I have a theory; which helps us transition into part two of our discussion of Proust's view of music.  I think music, at least great music, doesn't age (or at least doesn't age badly) because it is more evocative than definitive, it hints at more than it declares, which allows us to fill in the rest from our own emotion and perception and need. Eventually you know everything there is about that other person, especially if they aren't growing and recreating themselves (yes, one of my favorite themes), whereas there are infinite levels to Davis's So What.