My Years With Proust - Day 549

Although an operation that Brichot had undergone had restored to some small extent the sight which he had thought to be lost forever, I do not know whether he had observed the ruffian following in the Barton's footsteps.  Not that this mattered much, for since la Raspeliere, and notwithstanding the professor's friendly regard for M. de Charlus, the sight of the latter always made him feel somehow uneasy.  No doubt to every man the life of every other extends along shadowy paths of which he has no inkling.  Lying, though it is so often deceptive and is the basis of all conversation, conceals less thoroughly a feeling of hostility, or of self-interest, or a visit which one wants to appear not to have paid, or a short-lived escapade with a mistress which one is anxious to keep from one's wife, than a good reputation covers up - to the extent of not letting its existence be guessed - sexual depravity.  It may remain unsuspected for a lifetime; an accidental encounter on a pier, at night, discloses it; even then this accidental discovery is frequently misunderstood and a third person who is in the know must supply the elusive clue of which everyone is unaware.  But, once known, it scares one by making one feel that that way madness lies, far more than by its immorality.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, p. 203

I was just carrying out a conversation with a friend about one of those ineffable topics, in this case the nature of the soul and whether or not, either in the Abrahamic tradition or as part of reincarnation, you ever create new souls or just play out the string with the souls that were present or were created at the beginning of the process.  And, as to be expected, along the way we discussed the fact that some things are simply unknowable, and that even if you suspect a plan of some kind you're going to be disappointed if you're expecting a concrete answer (at least soon).  Of course, isn't that essentially true on this side of the cosmic divide as well?  Proust notes, "No doubt to every man the life of every other extends along shadowy paths of which he has no inkling."  We've talked before about our natural habit of exoticizing other people's lives (that is, they have to be more interesting than ours). In this case I think Proust is saying that, but, more to the point, he's saying that we look out into the world and assume that somehow it makes sense in some secretive, if not perverse, fashion, which somehow be revealed.  Your affair is revealed because your wife is in a bookstore somewhere she never goes on a day when she's scheduled to be visiting her sister who cancelled because she was sick and your wife to get out of the rain goes in the strange bookstore and ends up knocking over a book from an author she never reads and picks it up at the same time as a person she barely knows and they end up discussing a movie based on another novel by the same author and who they unexpectedly bumped into in the lobby of the theater.  Essentially, we think that life has one of those tortured Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon connection that one generally only finds in a Dickens novel. Further, we think that we could figure out all of these "shadowy paths" if we just had some help.  While I've read the Quran several times it wasn't until I invested in Nasr's Study Quran (which features mountains of  commentary and analysis, and sometimes an entire dense page of micro-print footnotes to explain one sentence) that I truly began to explain things.  I just needed context and guidance and, for all intents and purposes, a religious and intellectual road map.  Essentially, I need the same thing for life - preferably a series of guiding footnotes that run along the bottom of my vision's screen.  However, even if I believed that to be the case - again, I think we create this structure in our imagination to make life either more interesting or at least bearable - would I really want to know the connections?  Proust warns, "But, once known, it scares one by making one feel that that way madness lies . . ."