My Years With Proust - Day 607

I had now only one hope left for the future - a hope far more poignant than any fear - and that was that I might forget Albertine.  I knew that I should forget her one day; I had forgotten Gilberte and Mme de Guermantes; I had forgotten my grandmother.  And it is our most just and cruel punishment for that forgetfulness, as total and as tranquil as the oblivion of the graveyard, through which we have detached ourselves from those we no longer love, that we should recognise it to be inevitable in the case of those we love still.  In reality, we know that it is not a painful state but a state of indifference.  But not being able to think at one and the same time of what I was and of what I would be, I thought with despair of all that integument of caresses, of kisses, of friendly slumber, of which I must presently let myself be stripped forever.  The influx of these tender memories, breaking against the idea that Albertine was dead, oppressed me with such a clash of warring currents that I could not remain still; I rose, but all of a sudden I stopped, overwhelmed with anguish; the same faint daybreak that I used to see when I had just left Albertine, still radiant and warm from her kisses, had just drawn above the curtains its now sinister blade whose whiteness, cold, implacable and compact, glinted like a dagger thrust into my heart.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, pp. 490-491

Marcel understands that the only way to ease his suffering is to find a way to forget Albertine, but, of course, that brings a more cruel and long-lasting punishment: "And it is our most just and cruel punishment for that forgetfulness, as total and as tranquil as the oblivion of the graveyard, through which we have detached ourselves from those we no longer love, that we should recognise it to be inevitable in the case of those we love still." If we forget a loved one it is "not a painful state but a state of indifference," and knowing that it is possible means that we know that we will eventually forget everyone, and if that is true then how terrible is life?