My Years With Proust - Day 609

And lastly, if these changes of weather, these variegated days, each brought me back a different Albertine, it was not only through the evocation of similar moments.  It will be remembered that always, even  before I began to love, each season had made me a different person, swayed by other desires because he had other perceptions, a person who, having dreamed only of cliffs and storms overnight, if the indiscreet spring daybreak had insinuated a scent of roses through the gaps in the ill-fitting enclosure of his sleep, would wake up on the way to Italy.  Even in the course of my love, had not the volatile state of my emotional climate, the varying pressure of my beliefs, had they not one day reduced the visibility of the love that I was feeling, and the next day indefinitely extended it, one day embellished it to a smile, another day condensed it to a storm? We exist only by virtue of what we possess, we possess only what is really present to us, and many of our memories, our moods, our ideas sail away on a voyage of their own until they are lost to sight.  Then we can no longer take them into account in the total which is our personality.  But they know of secret paths by which to return to us.  And on certain nights, having gone to sleep almost without missing Albertine any more - we can only miss what we remember - on awakening I found a whole fleet of memories which had come to cruise upon the surface of my clearest consciousness and which I could distinguish perfectly.  Then I wept over what I could see so plainly, though overnight it had been to me non-existent.  In any instant, Albertine's name, her death, had changed their meaning; her betrayals had suddenly resumed their old importance.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, pp. 497-498

The other day (well, actually a century ago) Proust proposed that the only way that he'd find consolation would be to erase the memory of Albertine, while also accepting the impossibility of doing so because it would require erasing a hundred Albertines. Even if we could find a way to erase those hundred Albertines (and we all have our own hundred Albertines) memory has a way of imposing its will on us.  As Proust tells us, "We exist only by virtue of what we possess, we possess only what is really present to us, and many of our memories, our moods, our ideas sail away on a voyage of their own until they are lost to sight.  Then we can no longer take them into account in the total which is our personality.  But they know of secret paths by which to return to us."  As every first year Champlain College student (allegedly) knows, Linden in The Accidental Mind (aka the Pumpkin Book) informs us that for memory to work it must be malleable, but that also means that it is often unpredictable and almost always unreliable.  For this reason we may have, seemingly illogically, locked down certain memories, which may also reappear, again, seemingly, illogically, when we least expect them, making the challenge of erasing our hundred Albertines all the more challenging. Marcel realizes this as he notes, "Even in the course of my love, had not the volatile state of my emotional climate, the varying pressure of my beliefs, had they not one day reduced the visibility of the love that I was feeling, and the next day indefinitely extended it, one day embellished it to a smile, another day condensed it to a storm?" He also notes how the weather itself was bringing back different Albertines, which made me think of how I associate the women I've loved by season, and how each season brings another woman's memory to dominate my thoughts.  That said, I will not discuss these seasonal loves, for the obvious reasons.