Certainly, if he was thinking purely of the human heart, the poet was right when he spoke of the "mysterious threads" which are broken by life. But the truth, even more, is that life is perpetually weaving fresh threads which link one individual and one event to another, and that these threads are crossed and recrossed, doubled and redoubled to thicken the web, so that between any slightest point of our past and all the others a rich network of memories gives us an almost infinite variety of communicating paths to choose from.
At every moment of our lives we are surrounded by things and people which once were endowed with a rich emotional significance that they no longer possess. But let us cease to make use of them in an unconscious way, let us try to recall what they once were in our eyes, and how often do we not find that a thing later transformed into, as it were, mere raw material for our industrial use was once alive, and alive for us with a personal life of its own. All round me on the walls were paintings by Elstir, that Elstir who had first introduced me to Albertine. And it was in the house of Mme Verdurin that I was about to be presented to Mlle de Saint-Loup whom I was going to ask to be Albertine's successor in my life, in the house of that very Mme Verdurin whom I had so often visited with Albertine - and how enchanting they seemed in my memory, all those journeys that we had made together in the little train on the way to Douville and la Raspeliere - and who had also schemed first to promote and then to break not only my own love for Albertine but, long before it, that of the grandfather of this same Mlle de Saint-Loup. And to complete the process by which all my various pasts were fused into a single mass Mme Verdurin, like Gilberte, had married a Guermantes.
Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1086-1087
I've been thinking a lot about the threads that hold us together lately, which I guess is not surprising considering the end of the year, another birthday, the passing of my dear friend Gary Beatrice, and the birth of Heidi and Andy's daughter Sylvie (a happy event, but one that occurs in Michigan and not Vermont). Sometimes it seems that the threads are perpetually, and lately more rapidly, unraveling. That said, Proust opines, "But the truth, even more, is that life is perpetually weaving fresh threads which link one individual and one event to another, and that these threads are crossed and recrossed, doubled and redoubled to thicken the web, so that between any slightest point of our past and all the others a rich network of memories gives us an almost infinite variety of communicating paths to choose from." I think of my dear friend Dave Kelley and Jack Schultz, who have been mainstays in my life for decades now, and as we grow older we somehow find new ways to remain connected (it's funny how fantasy baseball and fantasy football and Twitter have allowed us to remain in daily contact) and if anything the threads that connect us have "doubled and redoubled."
The other line that really jumped out at me from this passage is the following: "At every moment of our lives we are surrounded by things and people which once were endowed with a rich emotional significance that they no longer possess. But let us cease to make use of them in an unconscious way, let us try to recall what they once were in our eyes, and how often do we not find that a thing later transformed into, as it were, mere raw material for our industrial use was once alive, and alive for us with a personal life of its own." Once (well, probably more than once) I wrote about how it's so odd that I ended up in Vermont, and followed so many professional and personal paths that I would have never encountered if I had stayed in Atlanta, mainly because my ex-wife wanted to move to Vermont. Truthfully, I had no interest in moving up here, and despite the frustrations that every professor at a community college feels and the academic wanderlust that makes us dream of teaching at a two year school, I was quite happy in Atlanta. So, where does that leave my ex-wife? I truly loved her, and she wasn't just a convenient prop to move my life along, some interesting Dickensian side character who moved the story along. I've learned many things from this now two year quest to read and comment on Remembrance of Things Past, and probably the biggest is what my own Past has meant. I've remembered how happy we were, and also how unhappy we were, and how I meant it when I said that I wanted to stay with her for the rest of our lives, and maybe in the stress of starting a new life I had forgotten that, or at least walled it off because of the guilt I felt.
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