My Years With Proust - Day 620

The painful mystery of this impossibility of ever making known to her what I had learned and of establishing our relations upon the truth of what I had only just discovered (and would not have been able, perhaps, to discover but for her death) substituted its sadness for the more painful mystery of her conduct.  What?  To have so desperately desired that Albertine - who no longer existed - should know that I had heard the story of the baths!  This again was one of the consequences of our inability, when we have to consider the fact of death, to picture to ourselves anything but life.  Albertine no longer existed; but to me she was the person who had concealed from me that she had assignations with women at Balbec, who imagined that she had succeeded in keeping me in ignorance of them.  When we try to consider what will happen to us after our own death, is it not still our living self which we mistakenly project at the moment?  And is it much more absurd, when all is said, to regret that a woman who no longer exists in unaware that we have learned what she was doing six years ago than to desire that of ourselves, who will be dead, the public shall still speak with approval a century hence?

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, p. 530

Marcel mourns the death of Albertine, not simply because she is dead, but because she is dead he can't share with her that he had discovered that "she was the person who had concealed from me that she had assignations with women at Balbec." As we know from Ecclesiastes, vanity of vanities, all is vanity.  Why do we feel the need to share with others our knowledge of their failings?  This is made even more absurd by our desire to share it with the dead as well.  It's not simply a case where we discovered something unpleasant about the dead (remember, I'm a historian) and we feel that we owe it to posterity to set the record straight.  Rather, we need to go to the dead themselves to let them know that we know.  If we catch up with them in heaven/hell/purgatory/void will this actually make them feel different about themselves - or change their placement in these locations?  No, it will just make us feel better about ourselves.  It's important that the dead know that we're too smart to be tricked, at least forever.  Happily, Proust is clearly aware of the folly of feelings, and is commenting more on the folly than the crime of him not being able to confront Albertine.