So that what I should have to annihilate in myself was not one, but innumerable Albertines. Each was attached to a moment, to the date of which I found myself carried back when I saw again that particular Albertine. And these moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future - towards a future which has itself become the past - drawing us along in their train. Never had I caressed the waterproofed Albertine of the rainy days; I wanted to ask her to take off that Armour, in order to experience with her the love of the tented field, the fraternity of travel. But this was no longer possible, for she was dead. Never, either, for fear of corrupting her, had I shown any sign of comprehension on the evenings when she seemed to be offering me pleasures which, but for my self-restraint, she might not perhaps have sought from others, and which aroused in me now a frantic desire. I should not have found them the same in any other woman, but I might scour the whole world now without encountering the woman who was prepared to give them to me, for Albertine was dead. It seemed that I had to choose between two facts, to decide which of them was true, to such an extent was the fact of Albertine's death - arising for me from a reality which I had no known, her life in Touraine - in contradiction with all my thoughts of her, my desires, my regrets, my tenderness, my rage, my jealousy. So great a wealth of memories borrowed from the treasury of her life, such a profusion of feeling evoking, implicating her life, seemed to make it incredible that Albertine should be dead. Such a profusion of feelings, for my memory, in preserving my affection, left it all its variety. It was not Albertine alone who was a succession of moments, it was also myself. My love for her was not simple: to a curiosity about the unknown had been added a sensual desire, and to a feeling of almost conjugal sweetness, at one moment indifference, at another a furious jealousy. I was not one man only, but as it were the march-past of a composite army in which there were passionate men, indifferent men, jealous men - jealous men not one of whom was jealous of the same woman. And no doubt it would be from this that one day would come the cure for which I had no wish. In a composite mass, the elements may one by one, without noticing it, be replaced by others, which others again eliminate, until in the end a change has been brought about which it would be impossible to conceive if we were a single person. The complexity of my love, of my person, multiplied and diversified my sufferings. And yet they could still be ranged in the two categories whose alternation had made up the whole life of my love for Albertine, swayed alternately by trust and by jealous suspicion.
Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, pp. 498-499
The other day in class we were discussing Proust. Yes, I give my first year students sections of Remembrance of Things Past to work on in class (I'm just that big of a bastard - or just that delusional about my teaching talents). We were discussing Proust's observations about the hundred different Albertines he would have to erase before he could be consoled, and that every person we knew was really a collection of separate, disjointed memories which our perception weaved together to form a quilt (or whatever one does to make quilts). At the same time Marcel realizes that while there are a hundred Albertines, there are also a hundred Marcels: "I was not one man only, but as it were the march-past of a composite army in which there were passionate men, indifferent men, jealous men - jealous men not one of whom was jealous of the same woman." Life continues to fly past and change and evolve, and so do we, which means that our self changes and evolves and consistently recreates itself. "And these moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future - towards a future which has itself become the past - drawing us along in their train."
Oh, and I'm really curious as to what act of depravity Marcel was referencing when he made this observation: "Never, either, for fear of corrupting her, had I shown any sign of comprehension on the evenings when she seemed to be offering me pleasures which, but for my self-restraint, she might not perhaps have sought from others, and which aroused in me now a frantic desire." I keep reflecting upon Marcel's manic jealousy and paranoia about Albertine's clumsy reference - or at least his reconstructed theory - to anal sex. Beyond Proust's own personal desires, the metaphor would work - just as it did so brilliantly in Scott Spencer's Endless Love.
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