My Years With Proust - Day 611

I had, during the last months, kept her shut up in my house.  But in my imagination now, Albertine was free; she was abusing her freedom, was prostituting herself to this person or that.  Formerly, I used constantly to think of the uncertainty of the future that stretched before us, and endeavour to read its message.  And now, what lay ahead of me, like a counterpart of the future - as worrying as the future because it was equally uncertain, equally difficult to decipher, equally mysterious, and crueller still because I did not have, as with the future, the possibility, or the illusion, of influencing it, and also because it would go on unfolding throughout the whole length of my life without my companion's being present to soothe the anguish that it caused me - was no longer Albertine's future, it was her past.  Her past?  That is the wrong word, since for jealousy there can be neither past nor future, and what it imagines is invariably the present.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, p. 500

You know, what I really haven't talked much about in this now almost two year exploration of Proust is my role as a historian, which probably explains my fascination with Remembrance of Things Past (well, and I have been a person who has loved literature since I was around fourteen).  Proust writes, "And now, what lay ahead of me, like a counterpart of the future - as worrying as the future because it was equally uncertain, equally difficult to decipher, equally mysterious, and crueller still because I did not have, as with the future, the possibility, or the illusion, of influencing it, and also because it would go on unfolding throughout the whole length of my life without my companion's being present to soothe the anguish that it caused me - was no longer Albertine's future, it was her past."  Marcel realizes that Albertine's past is now as unsolvable as mystery as her future.  I always reflect back on the scene in Denys Arcand's brilliant The Barbarian Invasions when he has Nathalie (Marie-Josee Croze) point out to the dying Remy (Remy Girard) that it's not the present or the future that he's terrified of losing but simply the past.  Maybe the past is all we actually possess (yes, I know that by saying that I'm defying Marcus Aurelius's admonition that it is only this moment, and not the past or the future, that we control) because we can control the narrative; or at least we can come closer to controlling the narrative.  And, truthfully, isn't this what we historians do?  We like to think that all of us must have at one time or another ate the petite madeleines and began to explore the past and make sense of it, but maybe the reality is that we are unhappy with our own past and we become historians in an attempt to rewrite everyone's past.