To make her chains appear light, the clever thing seemed to me to be to make her believe that I myself was about to break them. But I could not confide this mendacious plan ot her at that moment, since she had returned so sweetly from the Trocadero that afternoon; the most I could do, far from distressing her with the threat of a rupture, was to keep to myself those dreams of a perpetual life together which my grateful heart had formed. As I looked at her, I found it hard to restrain myself from pouring them out to her, and she may perhaps have noticed this. Unfortunately the expression of such feelings is not contagious. The case of an affected old woman like M. de Charlus who, by dint of never seeing in his imagination anything but a proud young man, thinks that he has himself become a proud young man, all the more so the more affected and ridiculous he becomes - this case is more general, and it is the misfortune of an impassioned lover not to realise that while he sees in front of him a beautiful face, his mistress is seeing his face, which is not made any more beautiful, far from it, when it is distorted by the pleasure that is aroused in it by the sight of beauty. Nor indeed does love exhaust the generality of this case; we do not see our own bodies, which other people see, and we "follow" our own train of thought, the object, invisible to other people, which is before out eyes. At times the artist reveals this object in his work. Whence it arises that the admirers of that work are disappointed in its author, on whose face that inner beauty is imperfectly reflected.
Every person we love, indeed to a certain extent every person, is to us like Janus, presenting to us a face that pleases us if the person leaves us, a dreary face if we know him or to be at our perpetual disposal. In the case of Albertine, the prospect of her continued society was painful to me in another way which I cannot explain in this narrative. It is terrible to have the life of another person attached to one's own like bomb which one holds in one's hands, unable to get rid of it without committing a crime. But one has only to compare this with the ups and down, the dangers, the anxieties, the fear that false but probable things will come to be believed when we will no longer be able to explain them - feelings that one experiences if one lives on intimate terms with a madman. For instance, I pitied M. de Charlus for living with Morel (immediately the memory of the scene that afternoon made me feel that the left side of my chest was heavier than the other); leaving aside the relations that may or may not have existed between them, M. de Charlus must have been unaware at the outset that Morel was mad. Morel's beauty, his stupidity, his pride must have deterred the Barton from exploring so deeply, until the days of melancholia when Morel accused M. de Charlus of responsibility for his sorrows, without being able to furnish any explanation, abusing him for his want of trust with the help of false but extremely subtle arguments, threatened him with desperate resolutions in the midst of which there persisted the most cunning regard for his own immediate interests. But all this is only a comparison. Albertine was not mad.
Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 179-180
I know this is a "duh" comment, but some people are not meant to be with other people, and I don't mean in a misanthropic/anti-social way in regards to general society, but rather that they're not meant to have that romanticized relationship with one person. And more and more I believe that Proust, or at least his fairly fictionalized alter ego, Marcel, was one of those people. He tells us, " Every person we love, indeed to a certain extent every person, is to us like Janus, presenting to us a face that pleases us if the person leaves us, a dreary face if we know him or to be at our perpetual disposal." Essentially, Albertine, or any woman for that matter, is beautiful if she's leaving but dreary if she's staying. Further, he opines, "It is terrible to have the life of another person attached to one's own like bomb which one holds in one's hands, unable to get rid of it without committing a crime." Obviously, it's perfect OK to be this person, as long as you know you're this person, otherwise you will leave a swath of emotional destruction in your wake. A very good friend of mine is a relatively new relationship and we're all hoping against hope that this one works out because he desperately wants to be in a relationship. Another friend of mine is not in a relationship, has never in my memory been in a relationship, has no desire to be in a relationship (and not in a wham bam thank you ma'am sort of way, he just prefers his own solitude) but completely understands his own nature and doesn't pursue relationships, and thus cause unintended problems, simply because society expects him to be in a relationship. If you truly know your own heart, and are conscious of other sentient beings in your immediate universe, then it probably doesn't matter what path you choose. On the one hand Proust's observation about every person being like Janus is a truism, but on the other hand it may be even more true for him personally than he realizes. Maybe he is one of those people who is not really meant to be with another person. When we think of him at the end, locked away in his Parisian apartment, sleeping all day and writing all night, racing death to finish Remembrance of Things Past, it's easy to think of it as a sad end; maybe it's better to think of it as his happiest, most contented time. Finally, he was free of the relationship whirlwind.
The other line from this short passage that jumped out at me is: "In the case of Albertine, the prospect of her continued society was painful to me in another way which I cannot explain in this narrative." In a novel of 3304 pages it's difficult to imagine that there were things that he couldn't find the time to explain. Now, I guess you could propose that he meant in this brief little mini-narrative inside of the meta-narrative he didn't have time to talk about it, and thus this is more of a case of imprecise language. There are many charges one could level against Proust, but imprecise language is not one of them. I guess this is another side avenue I need to explore down the road when I'm finished with my initial consideration of the novel. Stupid Proust, he's always giving me more homework.
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