But very soon, the triumphant motif of the bells having been banished, dispersed by others, I succumbed once again to the music; and I began to realise that if, in the body of this septet, different elements presented themselves one after another to combine at the close, so also Vinteuil's sonata and, as I later discovered, his other works as well, had been no more than timid essays, exquisite but very slight, beside the triumphal and consummate masterpiece now being revealed to me. And I could not help recalling by comparison that, in the same way too, I had thought of the other worlds that Vinteuil had created as being self-enclosed as each of my loves had been; whereas in reality I was obliged to admit that just as, within the context of the last of these - my love for Albertine - my first faint stirrings of love for her (at Balbec at the very beginning, then after the game of ferret, then on the night when she slept at the hotel, then in Paris on the foggy afternoon, then on the night of the Guermantes party, then at Balbec again, and finally in Paris where my life was now closely linked to hers) had been, so, if I now considered not my love for Albertine but my whole life, my other loves too had been no more than slight and timid essays that were paving the way, appeals that were unconsciously clamouring, for this vaster love; my love for Albertine.
Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 253-254
Proust rhapsodizes on the beauty of the Vinteuil sonata that has popped up now and again throughout Remembrance of Things Past, making it's first appearance back in Swann's Way. I've discussed it before and I didn't make it clear that it is a fictional piece, mainly because, and here I will freely admit my own ignorance as I always do with my own students (how can you promote the value of Mencius's Heart of Shame if you won't own it yourself?), I didn't realize that it was a fictional piece. There is a lovely little piece which we now associate with the imagined sonata, but that was actually composed by Jorge Arriagada for Raoul Ruiz's 1999 film Le Temps Retrouve. Since the initial publication of the novel a cottage industry has developed devoted to identifying the inspiration for different characters or events in the work, and this is also true of the Vinteuil sonata. There have been several pieces suggested, but apparently Proust himself in a letter to a friend revealed that his imagined sonata was inspired by Camille Saint-Saens's Violin Sonata No. 1 in D Minor. Ironically, apparently Proust was not a fan of Saint-Saens nor of much of this particular sonata, but there's a passage in the final third of the work that he loved and that was the inspiration.
Having said all that, mainly, I suppose, to claim public shame for not realizing that the piece was fictional, what I really find interesting about the passage is Proust's comment about how once he discovered Vinteuil's master work he also found out that "his other works as well, had been no more than timid essays, exquisite but very slight, beside the triumphal and consummate masterpiece now being revealed to me." Essentially, he's saying that what he thought was great was actually more a statement on his own ignorance. There is a story that when Paul McCartney played Brian Wilson an acetate of A Day in the Life from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band it almost broke Wilson. Now, truthfully, I've never been a Beatles fan but I can see why. Essentially the point of the story is that it made Wilson realize that what he was working on simply didn't measure up, that the world had moved on. I think there are those moments that what you thought was great simply aren't. The work that causes the realization could be brand new or it could be much older and it's just been sitting there waiting for you to discover it (and the new world). I've told the story several times about reading Winesburg, Ohio for the first time when I was something like fourteen and how suddenly everything I'd ever read before seemed foolish and childlike and that I never read an age-appropriate work again throughout my teenage years. The novel was old even then, and it had been sitting there for decades - in my romanticized retelling - waiting for me to discover it and to change my world. My musical equivalent of reading Anderson's novel would be the first time I heard Young's Tonight's the Night and a song like Tired Eyes; he was going someplace, and taking me with him, that others going, and suddenly all the other music I was listening to seemed pointless. Not surprisingly, Proust takes the story of his discovery of Vinteuil's best work and uses it as a metaphor to discuss much bigger issues, especially, again, not surprisingly, his love for Albertine. Proust tells us that he has learned that, "but my whole life, my other loves too had been no more than slight and timid essays that were paving the way, appeals that were unconsciously clamouring, for this vaster love; my love for Albertine." Not only do you need the outside spark, you also have to be in a place internally where you are ready to hear it or read it or experience it. Recently I've started listening to Miles Davis's Bitches Brew and songs like Miles Runs the Voodoo Down and I feel that I'm starting to both really appreciate it and really love it (before I think I appreciated what it represented, but that's not the same as liking it). The album hasn't changed, but I have. Why are so few of us happy in our love lives? Think of the number of factors, both internal and external, that have to be in sync for that to happen.
Of course, the problem with this is that it totally acquiesces to the tyranny of the Present, which, as we all know, in turn almost always caves to the tyranny of the Transient. While it might be OK for Marcel to view Gilberte as a natural stepping stone to Albertine it is certainly more than a bit dismissive of all of our past loves. I suppose we're all guilty of thinking that our current lover is The One, which means that all of the previous ones formed a long path as we grew and evolved and matured, and learned something from every relationship, until we reached the point where we can successfully enjoy The Relationship. Even though my ex-wife and I never reached the "death" part of til death due you part, I refuse to believe that she was nothing more than some training ground to prepare me for my current SO. The same could be said for Lovely British Girl or Beautiful Australian Girl, or any of the other women who have had the great misfortune to spend time with me over the years. Any of them could be The One and thus my current SO drops back to the practice squad? As we know, our brain has a natural tendency to create a narrative and organizing all the women we've loved into some progression seems to be another example.
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