And I ceased to follow the music, in order to ask myself once again whether Albertine had or had not seen Mlle Vinteuil during the last few days, as one interrogates anew an inner pain from which one has been distracted for a moment. For it was in myself that Albertine's possible actions were performed. Of every person we know we possess a double; but, being habitually situated on the horizon of our imagination, of our memory, it remains more or less extraneous to us, and what it has done or may have done has no greater capacity to cause us pain than an object situated at a certain distance which provides us with only the painless sensations of vision. The things that affect these people we perceive in a contemplative fashion; we are able to deplore them in appropriate language which gives other people a sense of our kindness of heart, but we do not feel them. But ever since the wound I had received at Balbec, it was deep in my heart, and very difficult to extricate, that Albertine's double was lodged. What I saw of her hurt me, as a sick man would be hurt whose senses were so seriously deranged that the sight of a colour would be felt by him internally like an incision in his living flesh. It was fortunate that I had not already yielded to the temptation to break with Albertine; the tedium of having to rejoin her presently, when I went home, was a trifling matter compared with the anxiety that I should have felt if the separation had occurred when I still had a doubt about her and before I had had time to grow indifferent to her.
Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 254-255
Marcel continues to think about Albertine as he listens to the performance of Vinteuil's music. Depending upon my mood I'd say he's reflecting and ruminating or maybe instead fretting and moping. What we have to keep in mind is that he has a very visceral connection to Vinteuil's music, and thus to the specter of the composer's daughter. Remember that years earlier Marcel, through a window (to be fair), had watched Vinteuil's daughter and another woman together in a moving and, at least for the age and for his age, shocking scene. He had also witnessed Vinteuil's daughter and her lover saying very cruel things to a photograph of the conductor on a nearby table, with the picture forming a metaphor for their rejection of him and his beliefs - or, if you will, a metaphor for them freeing themselves from his tyranny (although he isn't presented as much of a tyrant, so maybe it's better to say the tyranny of the age's societal expectations). Thus Vinteuil's daughter, at least for Marcel, ends up as the very manifestation of sex, or I guess to be more accurate of illicit homosexual sex, as well as of willful deception. So, as Marcel thinks about the possibility of Albertine's being with Vinteuil's daughter, the fact that he's sitting there listening to the sonata had to make it all the more overwhelming.
But having said that, Proust is also aware of how much of this experience was completely tied to his own experience, and thus, theoretically, within his ability to control. As Proust tells us, "For it was in myself that Albertine's possible actions were performed." By this he means that Albertine's actions and their ramifications live within his perception and memory and reaction to them. As much as we, at least in our popular culture reading of him, want to turn Proust into a neuroscientist or a self-help guru, he also is at times a Stoic, or, more aptly, he speaks the language of Stoicism. As much as emotion overwhelms him I suppose he was not much of a Stoic (about as much as I am), but you still get the sense that he's read the Stoics and defaults to some of their language and intellectual structure, even if his own passionate nature makes it a difficult fit. I've always felt that while we are often drawn to a religion or a philosophy that seems "natural" or "familiar" to us, we at the same time aspire to a philosophy that is exactly the opposite of how we feel about the world; much like we're often drawn to a lover who is our opposite in experience or temperament, hoping either consciously or unconsciously that she will "complete" us. After all, there was a reason why the immoderate, arrogant, passionate Greeks talked such a good game about knowing thyself and control. When Proust is saying that "it was in myself that Albertine's possible actions were performed" he sounds very much like someone who is at least familiar with Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius or other Stoic writers (something else for me to research someday). Proust continues, "Of every person we know we possess a double; but, being habitually situated on the horizon of our imagination, of our memory, it remains more or less extraneous to us, and what it has done or may have done has no greater capacity to cause us pain than an object situated at a certain distance which provides us with only the painless sensations of vision" There is the real person, but there is also the double, our perception of that person, who we control within our own heart and mind, and while we rarely can control the former, we at least have a shot at controlling or at least moderating the excesses of the latter.
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