My Years With Proust - Day 613

And I then felt, together with an intense pity for her, a sort of shame at having survived her.  It seemed to me indeed, in the hours when I suffered least, that I had somehow benefited from her death, for a woman is of greater utility to our life if, instead of being an element of happiness in it, she is an instrument of suffering, and there is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, p. 506

Marcel continues to work his way through his pain at the death of Albertine, although there are times when he doesn't seem that broken up about it.  However, let's be fair, it wouldn't make much of a novel if it were nothing more than pages of muffled sobs.  One of the things that we rightly celebrate about Remembrance of Things Past is Proust's extraordinary power of perception and attention to detail, and that has to relate to love and love and and pain and suffering as well.  Still, when he uses terms like "greater utility" to discuss the death of his great love it's going to rub some people the wrong way.  He's an artist, and it may be an old chestnut, but don't we all believe on some level that art is the child of suffering.  And if Proust (and Marcel) had lived a happy uneventful life we wouldn't remember him now, and we wouldn't be better people for having read the novel.  Do we really expected him to say things other than "there is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer"?  I argued a month or so ago that women are socialized to view marriage as a destination, whereas men never are; it may happen, but it's certainly not what their intended destination.  Consequently, women are too often viewed as a landmine, and one to be avoided at all cost.  There is a reason why the Romans, while they may have felt pity for Dido, didn't feel too much pity for her because she almost kept Aeneas from fulfilling his destiny.

 

My Years With Proust - Day 612

Albertine's intelligence pleased me because, by association, it reminded me of what I called her sweetness, as we call the sweetness of a fruit a certain sensation which exists only in our palate.  And in fact, when I thought of Albertine's intelligence, my lips instinctively protruded and savoured a memory of which I preferred that the reality should remain external to me and should consist in the objective superiority of a person.  There could be no denying that I had known people whose intelligence was greater.  But the infinitude of love, or its egoism, brings it about that the people whom we love are those whose intellectual and moral physiognomy is least objectively defined in our eyes; we alter them incessantly to suit our desires and fears, we do not separate them from ourselves, they are simply a vast, vague arena in which to exteriorise our emotions.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, p. 505

Proust proposes, "But the infinitude of love, or its egoism, brings it about that the people whom we love are those whose intellectual and moral physiognomy is least objectively defined in our eyes; we alter them incessantly to suit our desires and fears, we do not separate them from ourselves, they are simply a vast, vague arena in which to exteriorise our emotions." On the surface it seems like an odd statement, because who should we know better, both physically and intellectually, than our lover, but I think, as usual, that Proust is on to something.  Maybe it is because we idealize love, and thus we would idealize our lover (when we aren't actively demonizing her), that we don't have a clear picture.  And because we don't have - or I guess need - a clear picture we can write what we want.  Sadly, this is what often causes breakups.  We're stunned that our lover has said or done something that we did not plan for in our fabricated identity for her, although it might have been perfectly natural for her actual self.

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.

My Years With Proust - Day 610

So that what I should have to annihilate in myself was not one, but innumerable Albertines. Each was attached to a moment, to the date of which I found myself carried back when I saw again that particular Albertine.  And these moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future - towards a future which has itself become the past - drawing us along in their train.  Never had I caressed the waterproofed Albertine of the rainy days; I wanted to ask her to take off that Armour, in order to experience with her the love of the tented field, the fraternity of travel.  But this was no longer possible, for she was dead.  Never, either, for fear of corrupting her, had I shown any sign of comprehension on the evenings when she seemed to be offering me pleasures which, but for my self-restraint, she might not perhaps have sought from others, and which aroused in me now a frantic desire.  I should not have found them the same in any other woman, but I might scour the whole world now without encountering the woman who was prepared to give them to me, for Albertine was dead. It seemed that I had to choose between two facts, to decide which of them was true, to such an extent was the fact of Albertine's death - arising for me from a reality which I had no known, her life in Touraine - in contradiction with all my thoughts of her, my desires, my regrets, my tenderness, my rage, my jealousy.  So great  a wealth of memories borrowed from the treasury of her life, such a profusion of feeling evoking, implicating her life, seemed to make it incredible that Albertine should be dead.  Such a profusion of feelings, for my memory, in preserving my affection, left it all its variety.  It was not Albertine alone who was a succession of moments, it was also myself.  My love for her was not simple: to a curiosity about the unknown had been added a sensual desire, and to a feeling of almost conjugal sweetness, at one moment indifference, at another a furious jealousy.  I was not one man only, but as it were the march-past of a composite army in which there were passionate men, indifferent men, jealous men - jealous men not one of whom was jealous of the same woman.  And no doubt it would be from this that one day would come the cure for which I had no wish.  In a composite mass, the elements  may one by one, without noticing it, be replaced by others, which others again eliminate, until in the end a change has been brought about which it would be impossible to conceive if we were a single person.  The complexity of my love, of my person, multiplied and diversified my sufferings.  And yet they could still be ranged in the two categories whose alternation had made up the whole life of my love for Albertine, swayed alternately by trust and by jealous suspicion.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, pp. 498-499

The other day in class we were discussing Proust.  Yes, I give my first year students sections of Remembrance of Things Past to work on in class (I'm just that big of a bastard - or just that delusional about my teaching talents).  We were discussing Proust's observations about the hundred different Albertines he would have to erase before he could be consoled, and that every person we knew was really a collection of separate, disjointed memories which our perception weaved together to form a quilt (or whatever one does to make quilts). At the same time Marcel realizes that while there are a hundred Albertines, there are also a hundred Marcels: "I was not one man only, but as it were the march-past of a composite army in which there were passionate men, indifferent men, jealous men - jealous men not one of whom was jealous of the same woman." Life continues to fly past and change and evolve, and so do we, which means that our self changes and evolves and consistently recreates itself.  "And these moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future - towards a future which has itself become the past - drawing us along in their train."

Oh, and I'm really curious as to what act of depravity Marcel was referencing when he made this observation: "Never, either, for fear of corrupting her, had I shown any sign of comprehension on the evenings when she seemed to be offering me pleasures which, but for my self-restraint, she might not perhaps have sought from others, and which aroused in me now a frantic desire." I keep reflecting upon Marcel's manic jealousy and paranoia about Albertine's clumsy reference - or at least his reconstructed theory - to anal sex.  Beyond Proust's own personal desires, the metaphor would work - just as it did so brilliantly in Scott Spencer's Endless Love.

My Years With Proust - Day 609

And lastly, if these changes of weather, these variegated days, each brought me back a different Albertine, it was not only through the evocation of similar moments.  It will be remembered that always, even  before I began to love, each season had made me a different person, swayed by other desires because he had other perceptions, a person who, having dreamed only of cliffs and storms overnight, if the indiscreet spring daybreak had insinuated a scent of roses through the gaps in the ill-fitting enclosure of his sleep, would wake up on the way to Italy.  Even in the course of my love, had not the volatile state of my emotional climate, the varying pressure of my beliefs, had they not one day reduced the visibility of the love that I was feeling, and the next day indefinitely extended it, one day embellished it to a smile, another day condensed it to a storm? We exist only by virtue of what we possess, we possess only what is really present to us, and many of our memories, our moods, our ideas sail away on a voyage of their own until they are lost to sight.  Then we can no longer take them into account in the total which is our personality.  But they know of secret paths by which to return to us.  And on certain nights, having gone to sleep almost without missing Albertine any more - we can only miss what we remember - on awakening I found a whole fleet of memories which had come to cruise upon the surface of my clearest consciousness and which I could distinguish perfectly.  Then I wept over what I could see so plainly, though overnight it had been to me non-existent.  In any instant, Albertine's name, her death, had changed their meaning; her betrayals had suddenly resumed their old importance.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, pp. 497-498

The other day (well, actually a century ago) Proust proposed that the only way that he'd find consolation would be to erase the memory of Albertine, while also accepting the impossibility of doing so because it would require erasing a hundred Albertines. Even if we could find a way to erase those hundred Albertines (and we all have our own hundred Albertines) memory has a way of imposing its will on us.  As Proust tells us, "We exist only by virtue of what we possess, we possess only what is really present to us, and many of our memories, our moods, our ideas sail away on a voyage of their own until they are lost to sight.  Then we can no longer take them into account in the total which is our personality.  But they know of secret paths by which to return to us."  As every first year Champlain College student (allegedly) knows, Linden in The Accidental Mind (aka the Pumpkin Book) informs us that for memory to work it must be malleable, but that also means that it is often unpredictable and almost always unreliable.  For this reason we may have, seemingly illogically, locked down certain memories, which may also reappear, again, seemingly, illogically, when we least expect them, making the challenge of erasing our hundred Albertines all the more challenging. Marcel realizes this as he notes, "Even in the course of my love, had not the volatile state of my emotional climate, the varying pressure of my beliefs, had they not one day reduced the visibility of the love that I was feeling, and the next day indefinitely extended it, one day embellished it to a smile, another day condensed it to a storm?" He also notes how the weather itself was bringing back different Albertines, which made me think of how I associate the women I've loved by season, and how each season brings another woman's memory to dominate my thoughts.  That said, I will not discuss these seasonal loves, for the obvious reasons.

My Years With Proust - Day 608

   Linked as it was to each of the seasons, in order for me to discard the memory of Albertine I should have had to forget them all, even if it meant having to get to know them all over again, like an old man learning to read again after a stroke; I should have had to renounce the entire universe.  Nothing, I told myself, but a veritable extinction of myself would be capable (but that is impossible) of consoling me for hers.  It did not occur to me that the death of oneself is neither impossible nor extraordinary; it is effected without our knowledge, sometimes against our will, every day of our lives.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, p. 494

Marcel continues to work through his sorrow at the death of Albertine.  The other day he was talking about the hundreds of different Albertines he would have to forget, which is a reflection on the many different masks we all wear but also the many different ways in which two people are linked.  You're not simply trying to forget her propensity to write you little notes, which you remember when another woman writes you a note, but also how she took her coffee, which you remember when you have coffee with another woman - or that one thing that she did sexually, which you remember, clumsily, and painfully, when you're having sex with another woman - or her love of your favorite musician, which you remember when you're discussing with another woman her disdain for your favorite musician - or her plans for your future together, which you remember when you're discussing another woman's plans for your future, etc.  There are many corners of your world where she hides.  It's not simply the near impossibility of eliminating all these Albertines, but the realization that if it is possible to do so then it is certainly possible to eliminate you as well.  As Proust notes, "It did not occur to me that the death of oneself is neither impossible nor extraordinary; it is effected without our knowledge, sometimes against our will, every day of our lives."  Or, as Marcus Aurelius reminded us, "Soon you will have forgotten the world, and the world will have forgotten you."

My Years With Proust - Day 607

I had now only one hope left for the future - a hope far more poignant than any fear - and that was that I might forget Albertine.  I knew that I should forget her one day; I had forgotten Gilberte and Mme de Guermantes; I had forgotten my grandmother.  And it is our most just and cruel punishment for that forgetfulness, as total and as tranquil as the oblivion of the graveyard, through which we have detached ourselves from those we no longer love, that we should recognise it to be inevitable in the case of those we love still.  In reality, we know that it is not a painful state but a state of indifference.  But not being able to think at one and the same time of what I was and of what I would be, I thought with despair of all that integument of caresses, of kisses, of friendly slumber, of which I must presently let myself be stripped forever.  The influx of these tender memories, breaking against the idea that Albertine was dead, oppressed me with such a clash of warring currents that I could not remain still; I rose, but all of a sudden I stopped, overwhelmed with anguish; the same faint daybreak that I used to see when I had just left Albertine, still radiant and warm from her kisses, had just drawn above the curtains its now sinister blade whose whiteness, cold, implacable and compact, glinted like a dagger thrust into my heart.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, pp. 490-491

Marcel understands that the only way to ease his suffering is to find a way to forget Albertine, but, of course, that brings a more cruel and long-lasting punishment: "And it is our most just and cruel punishment for that forgetfulness, as total and as tranquil as the oblivion of the graveyard, through which we have detached ourselves from those we no longer love, that we should recognise it to be inevitable in the case of those we love still." If we forget a loved one it is "not a painful state but a state of indifference," and knowing that it is possible means that we know that we will eventually forget everyone, and if that is true then how terrible is life?