My only hope was that Albertine had gone to Touraine, to her aunt's house, where after all she would be under some sort of surveillance and could not do anything very serious before I brought her back. My worse fear was that she might have stayed in Paris, or have gone to Amsterdam or to Montjouvain, in other words that she had escape in order to pursue some intrigue the preliminaries of which I had failed to observe. But in reality, when I said to myself Paris, Amsterdam, Montjouvain, that is to say several places, I was thinking of places that were merely potential. And so, when Albertine's hall porter informed me that she had gone to Touraine, that place of residence which I had thought desirable seemed to me the most dreadful of all, because it was real, and because for the first time, tortured by the certainty of the present and the uncertainty of the future, I pictured Albertine starting on a life which she had deliberately chosen to lead apart from me, perhaps for a long time, perhaps for ever, a life in which she would realise that unknown element which in the past had so often troubled me, even though I enjoyed the good fortune of possessing, of caressing what was its outer shell, that charming face, impenetrable and captive. It was this unknown element that formed the core of my love. As for Albertine herself, she scarcely existed in me save under the form of her name, which, but for certain rare moments of respite when I awoke, came and engraved itself upon my brain and continued incessantly to do so. If I had thought aloud, I should have kept on repeating it, and my speech would have been as monotonous, as limited, as if I had been transformed into a bird, a bird like the one from the fable whose song repeated incessantly the name of her whom it had loved when a man. One says the name of oneself, and since one remains silent it is as thought one were inscribing it inside oneself, as thought it were leaving its trace on one's brain, which must end up, like a wall on which somebody has amused himself scribbling, by being entirely covered with the name, written a thousand times over, of the woman one loves. One rewrites it all the time in one's mind when one is happy, and even more when one is unhappy. And one feels a constantly recurring need to repeat this name which bring one nothing more than than what one already knows, until, in course of time, it wearies us.
Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, pp. 438-439
As Marcel continues to dissect the collapse of his relationship with Albertine, and thus also the relationship itself, he begins to come to the realization that he had never really known her at all. Proust tells us, " . . . I pictured Albertine starting on a life which she had deliberately chosen to lead apart from me, perhaps for a long time, perhaps for ever, a life in which she would realise that unknown element which in the past had so often troubled me, even though I enjoyed the good fortune of possessing, of caressing what was its outer shell, that charming face, impenetrable and captive." As part of not knowing her, he also doesn't know what she wants and desires, that "unknown element" which directs, and in many ways, animates her. Not to be too simplistic or reductive, but isn't this true of all of us? Maybe our best relationship is the ones where we manage risk and uncertainty. I'm sure I've made this point before, but maybe the key to understanding love is not reading Shakeapeare's Sonnets but rather studying the uncertainty principle. Of course, if we truly understood our beloved then maybe they wouldn't be worthy of our love. Proust continues, " It was this unknown element that formed the core of my love." Maybe it's best to think that we love someone not for what they are but for what they might be, since the narrative we construct is doubtless more interesting than the reality. Marcel realizes that all he possessed of Albertine at that moment, and maybe, truthfully, all he ever possessed of her, was her name, which he found himself repeating with almost totemistic persistence.
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