My Years With Proust - Day 635

   As there is a geometry in space, so there is a psychology in time, in which the calculations of a plane psychology would no longer be accurate because we should not be taking account of time and one of the forms that it assumes, forgetting - forgetting, the force of which I was beginning to feel and which is so powerful an instrument of adaptation to reality because it gradually destroys in us the surviving past which is in perpetual contradiction to it.  And I really ought to have discovered sooner that one day I should no longer be in love with Albertine. When I had realised from the difference that existed between what the importance of her person and of her actions was to me and what it was to other people, that my love was not so much a love for her as a love in myself, I might have drawn various conclusions from this subjective nature of my love and in particular decided that, being a mental state, in no real connexion with that person, it must, like every mental state, even the most lasting, find itself one day obsolete, be "replaced," and that when that day came everything that seemed to attach me so sweetly, indissolubly, to the memory of Albertine would no longer exist in me.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, p. 658

As Milan Kundera reminded us in his extraordinary The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Kundera, per usual, was spot on, as we're seeing every day as part of the Trump dystopian novel we're living (and dying) through.  It is true when fighting the tyranny of a Donald Trump, but it's also true when fight the tyranny of time. Proust, reflecting upon Albertine's death, writes: "As there is a geometry in space, so there is a psychology in time, in which the calculations of a plane psychology would no longer be accurate because we should not be taking account of time and one of the forms that it assumes, forgetting - forgetting, the force of which I was beginning to feel and which is so powerful an instrument of adaptation to reality because it gradually destroys in us the surviving past which is in perpetual contradiction to it."  But isn't forgetting at times the best option?  When we've had our heart broken don't our friends tell us to forget her?  Of course, we never actually forget her, nor do our friends think that we will.  Rather, they are admonishing us to not let the pain take over our lives and disable us.  We need to not forget, but rather to view the memory with some distance and thus context.  Marcel begins to fear that he's starting to forget Albertine, but instead he is just coming to terms with her memory, which means that the pain, and also the specifics, are starting to fade.  In turn, Marcel realizes that maybe his love was not about her but rather about himself. "When I had realised from the difference that existed between what the importance of her person and of her actions was to me and what it was to other people, that my love was not so much a love for her as a love in myself . . ."  Love is never an tangible, external phenomenon, but always a perception that exists within us.