Further on, another little girl was kneeling beside her bicycle, which she was putting to rights. The repair finished, the young racer mounted her machine, but without straddling it as a man would have done. For a moment the bicycle swerved, and the young body seemed to have added to itself a sail, a huge wing; and presently we saw the young creature speed away, half-human, half-winged, angel or peri, pursuing her course.
This was what the presence of Albertine, this was what my life with Albertine, deprived me of. Deprived me, did I say? Should I not have thought rather: what it presented to me? If Albertine had not been living with me, if she had been free, I should have imagined, and with reason, every one of these women as a possible or indeed a probable object of her desire, of her pleasure. They would have appeared to me like dancers in a diabolical ballet, representing the Temptations to one person, and shooting their darts into the heart of another. Midinettes, schoolgirls, actresses, how I should have hated them all! Objects of horror, for me they would have been excluded from the beauty of the universe. Albertine's servitude, by releasing me from suffering on their account, restored them to the beauty of the world. Now that they were harmless, having lost the sting that stabs the heart with jealousy, I was free to admire them, to caress them with my eyes, another day more intimately perhaps. By shutting Albertine away, I had at the same time restored to the universe all those glittering wings that flutter in public gardens, ballrooms, theatres, and which became tempting once more to me because she could no longer succumb to their temptation. They composed the beauty of the world. They had at one time composed that of Albertine. It was because I had seen her first as a mysterious bird, then as a great actress of the beach, desired, perhaps won, that I had thought her wonderful. As soon as she was a captive in my house, the bird that I had seen one afternoon advancing with measured tread along the front, surrounded by a congregation of other girls like seagulls alighted from who knew where, Albertine had lost all her colours, together with all the opportunities that other people had of securing her for themselves. Gradually she had lost her beauty. It required excursions like this, in which I imagined her, but for my presence, accosted by some woman or by some young man, to make me see her again amid the splendour of the beach, although my jealousy was on a different plane from the decline of the pleasures of my imagination. But in spite of these abrupt reversions in which, desired, by other people, she once more became beautiful in my eyes, I might very well have divided her stay with me into two periods, in the first of which she was still, although less so every day, the glittering actress of the beach, and in the second of which, become the grey captive, reduced to her drab self, she needed these flashes in which I remembered the past to restore her colour to her.
Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 170-171
After I officiated at the wedding of my friends Heidi and Andy, my great friend Mike Kelly, by way of a compliment, proposed that I had shared some serious truth in my sermon. By that he meant that I had not only spoken the truth, but shared some essential truth. In this passage Proust shares some serious truth, both in regards to his own shortcoming but also the shortcomings of us as humans. When considering what he might have as a free man, Proust tells us, "This was what the presence of Albertine, this was what my life with Albertine, deprived me of." While this statement might demand a collective dope slap from the readers, he then immediately follows it with, "Deprived me, did I say? Should I not have thought rather: what it presented to me?" If almost everything comes back to Proust, everything always comes back to Marcus Aurelius. In the Meditations we are told, "Choose not to be harmed - and you won't be harmed. Don't feel harmed - and you haven't been." Or, as Epictetus, an even earlier Stoic, tells us, "It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters." Essentially, it's all about perception. On one level Proust understands this because he immediately calls himself on it when he writes, "Should I not have thought rather: what it presented to me?" I think it was Dostoevsky who described man as the ungrateful biped. It is in some ways the beauty/curse of the human condition. We strive and create because on some level we are not satisfied and dream of better worlds. Gombrich, in the Story of Art, proposed that Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, who he credits with the origins of modern art, were united in one thing: dissatisfaction. It also means that we are, well, dissatisfied. And we can completely understand the nature of our dissatisfaction, and its concomitant idiocy/irony, and still be dissatisfied.
What inspired this moment of intense self-reflection? As with most male moments of epiphany it relates to seeing a beautiful woman. "For a moment the bicycle swerved, and the young body seemed to have added to itself a sail, a huge wing; and presently we saw the young creature speed away, half-human, half-winged, angel or peri, pursuing her course." He is taken with her beauty, and for that matter the beauty of all women. What makes this all the more complex, and fascinating, is that his perception of the women was colored both by his imagined freedom and Albertine's real captivity. "If Albertine had not been living with me, if she had been free, I should have imagined, and with reason, every one of these women as a possible or indeed a probable object of her desire, of her pleasure. They would have appeared to me like dancers in a diabolical ballet, representing the Temptations to one person, and shooting their darts into the heart of another. Midinettes, schoolgirls, actresses, how I should have hated them all! Objects of horror, for me they would have been excluded from the beauty of the universe." So, he was viewing the women not solely through the lens of his own carnality (Marcel, unlike me, was not free of the carnal whirlwind) but through Albertine's, or at least his perception of Albertine's. If Albertine were free in the world Marcel would not be able to view the women dispassionately as paragons of aesthetic beauty, and obviously we're through the looking glass here because we're talking about viewing them passionately, because of his fear that they would all become lovers of Albertine. However, because Albertine was not, in fact, free, he could appreciate the women for their beauty. "Albertine's servitude, by releasing me from suffering on their account, restored them to the beauty of the world." OK, this is remarkably self-serving, but it does bring up interesting questions about perception and beauty. As I've discussed previously, at various times in my long life I've been involved with very jealous women, who tended to view other women as a threat (although, truthfully, who would want me?). Using Proust's logic, or at least his definition, would this mean that they would have not have been able to appreciate the beauty of other women as an aesthetic concept? Essentially, just as my own base carnal desires (in the days before I was free of the whirlwind) would have contaminated my ability to view women as beautiful on some sort of dispassionate aesthetic scale, the jealous women in my life would have been unable to judge the aesthetic beauty of women in our immediate universe because of their own fear of my base carnal desires (in the days before I was free of the whirlwind)? So, similar to Marcel during Albertine's captivity, after my death my jealous ex-lovers (who will doubtless show up to my funeral, wearing red dresses) will rediscover beauty.
Proust's logic is almost certainly flawed, although he makes an interesting point. That said, he also damaged it by saying, "Now that they were harmless, having lost the sting that stabs the heart with jealousy, I was free to admire them, to caress them with my eyes, another day more intimately perhaps." By damaging I mean that it comes back to his own desire and not some dispassionate appreciation of beauty.
In the end, what is sad about all of this is that Albertine suffered because of Proust's mania. Proust tells us, "It was because I had seen her first as a mysterious bird, then as a great actress of the beach, desired, perhaps won, that I had thought her wonderful. As soon as she was a captive in my house, the bird that I had seen one afternoon advancing with measured tread along the front, surrounded by a congregation of other girls like seagulls alighted from who knew where, Albertine had lost all her colours, together with all the opportunities that other people had of securing her for themselves. Gradually she had lost her beauty." This, of course, brings us back to our discussion last week about the varying divergence between potential possession of a lover and certain possession of our lover. Albertine's captivity freed the rest of the women in the world and made them beautiful again, but only stole her own beauty. "But in spite of these abrupt reversions in which, desired, by other people, she once more became beautiful in my eyes, I might very well have divided her stay with me into two periods, in the first of which she was still, although less so every day, the glittering actress of the beach, and in the second of which, become the grey captive, reduced to her drab self, she needed these flashes in which I remembered the past to restore her colour to her."
Albertine, the "grey captive."
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