Indecipherable they may have been, but they had nevertheless been in the end deciphered, by dint of patience, intelligence and respect, by the only person who had been sufficiently close to Vinteuil to understand his method of working, to interpret his orchestral indications: Mlle Vinteuil's friend. Even in the lifetime of the great composer, she had acquired from his daughter the veneration that the latter felt for her father. It was because of this veneration that, in those moments in which people run counter to their true inclinations, the two girls had been able to take an insane pleasure in the profanations which have already been narrated. (Her adoration of her father was the very condition of his daughter's sacrilege. And no doubt they ought to have forgone the voluptuous pleasure of that sacrilege, but it did not express the whole of their natures.) And, moreover, the profanations had become rarer until they disappeared altogether, as those morbidly carnal relations, that troubled, smouldering conflagration, had gradually given way to the flame of a pure and lofty friendship. Mlle Vinteuil's friend was sometimes tormented by the nagging thought that she might have hastened Vinteuil's death. At any rate, by spending years unravelling the cryptic scroll left by him, by establishing the correct reading of those illegible hieroglyphics, she had the consolation of ensuring an immortal and compensatory glory for the composer over whose last years she had cast such a shadow. Relations which are not sanctioned by the law establish bonds of kinship as manifold, as complex, and even more solid, than those which spring from marriage. Indeed, without pausing to consider relations of so special a nature, do we not find every day that adultery, when it is based on genuine love, not weaken family feelings and the duties of kinship, but rather revivifies them? Adultery then brings the spirit into what marriage would often have left a dead letter.
Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 263-264
Proust revisits the relationship between Mlle and her friend, the one that he watched through the window years earlier and the one that has haunted him. He tells us that their fiery passion had eventually given way to "the flame of a pure and lofty friendship." As we've discussed several times, although Proust often refers to homosexuals as "inverts", which, again, may be his own conscious or unconscious mechanism for disguising his own sexuality, in other ways he consistently displays an understanding that transcends his age. He tells us, "Relations which are not sanctioned by the law establish bonds of kinship as manifold, as complex, and even more solid, than those which spring from marriage." Essentially, a relationship outside the bounds of a hetero-normative one bounded by a societally ordained marriage can be just "as manifold, as complex, and even more solid." However, what really jumped out at me in this passage were his comments on adultery. Proust writes: "Indeed, without pausing to consider relations of so special a nature, do we not find every day that adultery, when it is based on genuine love, not weaken family feelings and the duties of kinship, but rather revivifies them? Adultery then brings the spirit into what marriage would often have left a dead letter." Years ago when I was reading Playboy to the blind in Atlanta, and I know I've shared this story before so please bear with me, I remember reading a story about a professor who had done a lot of research on infidelity and come up with a series of categories. At the time, the one that resonated with me was the Maintenance Affair; that is, an affair that allowed you to stay in the marriage because it provided something that was missing from the marriage, whether that was some particular aspect of carnal gymnastics or someone to go to the art museum with. I think Proust would have understood that concept, and I certainly did at the time. As I've grown older, and now that I'm free of the whirlwind, I've often reflected back on my understanding, and promotion, of the concept of the Maintenance Affair then. Was it really just cognitive dissonance? Was it a way to reconcile my innumerable failings in the guise of some (probably dodgy) intellectual construct? Or is this just another indication of the cooling of my blood (I suppose the answer is somewhere between Lucinda Williams's Hot Blood and Buddy Guy's Done Got Old)? We've been talking a lot lately about the difference between The One and The Ones, and I wonder what role that plays in the equation?
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