My Years With Proust - Day 650

   I saw a good deal of Gilberte at this time, as it happened, having renewed my friendship with her for our life, in the long run, is not calculated according to the duration of our friendships.  Let a certain period of time elapse, and you will see (just as, in politics, former ministries reappear, or, in the theatre, forgotten plays are revived) friendships renews between the same persons as before, after long years of interruption, and renewed with pleasure.  After ten years, the reasons which made one party love too passionatly, the other unable to endure a too exacting despotism, no longer exist.  The affinity alone survives, and everything that Gilberte would have refused me in the past, that had seemed to her intolerable, impossible, she granted me quite readily - doubtless because I no longer desired it.  Although neither of us had ever mentioned the reason for this change, if she was always ready to come to me, never in a hurry to leave me, it was because the obstacle had vanished: my love.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, p. 694

It is funny how friendships come and go over the years.  I've been remarkably fortunate to have a series of friends who I've been close to for decades, but other folks just disappeared off the face of the earth, and doubtless it was probably more my fault than theirs.  Considering how much we change over the years it's rather amazing that we keep friends at all.  I didn't stay in my hometown and have lived in Cincinnati and Atlanta and Vermont - and, for that matter, Mumbai and Abu Dhabi - and passed through high school and college and graduate school and a couple of teaching positions.  With every stop along the way I changed and evolved, and yet there are some folks who have always been there - whose friendship has always fit.  I've now known Dave Kelley for something like thirty-five years - and Jack Schultz for something like forty-five years - and yet there's never been an uncomfortable feeling that they were a friend from a different age and we had nothing to talk about any more.  Truthfully, I've had more of those moments with my own family with either of the two of them.

In this passage Marcel reflects upon his relationship, now renewed, with Gilberte, after the death of Albertine.  What I find interesting is the line, "and everything that Gilberte would have refused me in the past, that had seemed to her intolerable, impossible, she granted me quite readily."  His point is that she granted them because he no longer loved her and no longer demanded them, and because they weren't a demand she would grant them quite willingly without losing face.  A ex-mistress will happily cross the ocean to see you when your wife won't cross the six inch no-man's zone in the middle of the bed.  So that much is a "duh."  What I'd really like to know is what Gilberte would have found "intolerable, impossible" once but which she now granted "quite readily."  I suppose it could be a request to meet for tea to discuss painfully long French novels, although the romantic (or the perv) in me suspects it's something more creative.