My Years With Proust - Day 582

I could, if I chose, take Albertine on my knee, hold her head in my hands, I could caress her, run my hands slowly over her, but, just as if I been handling a stone which encloses the salt of immemorial oceans or the light of a star, I felt that I was touching no more than the sealed envelope of a person who inwardly reached to infinity.  How I suffered from the position to which we are reduced by the obliviousness of nature which, when instituting the division of bodies, never thought of making possible the interpenetration of souls! And I realised that Albertine was not even for me (for if her body was in the power of mine, her thoughts eluded the grasp of my thoughts) the marvellous captive with whom I had thought to enrich my home, while concealing her presence there as completely, even from the friends who came to see me and never suspected that she was at the end of the corridor, in the room next to my own, as did that man of whom nobody knew that he kept the Princess of China sealed in a bottle; urging me with cruel and fruitless insistence in quest of the past, she resembled, in anything, a mighty goddess of Time. And if I had to waste years of my life and much of my fortune for her sake - and provided that I can tell myself, which is by no means certain, alas, that she herself lost nothing - I have nothing to regret.  No doubt solitude would have been better, more fruitful, less painful.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, p. 393

Why is it that we are so forgiving of some characters, either in the real world or in the realms of literature or film?  Granted, there are times when Marcel is annoying, either because he's being sexist or hypocritical or self-pitying, but in the end we forgive him.  I mean, I finished all 3304 pages of Remembrance of Things Past and never threw my hands up in disgust or frustration.  Is it because we feel that he is speaking an essential truth?  Is it because the beauty of Proust's words overwhelm anything else?  Or is it because that even if at times he's more than a tad whiny we feel his almost existential pain and we connect to it?  Proust tells us, "No doubt solitude would have been better, more fruitful, less painful." Nevertheless, Marcel doesn't choose solitude, and spends years pursuing Albertine, although it's clear that, even when she is his "captive" he never truly possesses her.  In almost tangible despair, Proust shares: "I could, if I chose, take Albertine on my knee, hold her head in my hands, I could caress her, run my hands slowly over her, but, just as if I been handling a stone which encloses the salt of immemorial oceans or the light of a star, I felt that I was touching no more than the sealed envelope of a person who inwardly reached to infinity." A couple days we talked about Proust focusing on the surface level of Albertine and being unable to delve deeper.  All of us have found ourselves in that position.  Is it because we didn't try and delve deeper or the other person never let us in, or we weren't really supposed to be together in the first place? 

"How I suffered from the position to which we are reduced by the obliviousness of nature which, when instituting the division of bodies, never thought of making possible the interpenetration of souls!"