Terra Heatherly-Norton

5/4/15

Journal #4

“I said to myself sadly that this love of ours, in so far as it is a love for one particular creature, is not perhaps a very real thing, since, though associations of pleasant or painful musings can attach it for a time to a woman to the extent of making us believe that it has been inspired by her in a logically necessary way, if on the other hand we detach ourselves deliberately or unconsciously from those associations, this love, as though it were in fact spontaneous and sprang from ourselves alone, will revive in order to bestow itself on another woman.” -Within a Budding Grove

Pg 299

I came across this passage a couple of weeks ago and kept meaning to write about it, the conversation we had in seminar today about Proust description of women reminded me of it. In this quote I think Proust is commenting on the impermanence of love. He talks about it as though the emotion is not connected to any particular person but can manifest itself through people. Women that “inspire” love don’t actually create anything they just provoke an already present emotion and the reciprocator believes it is because of them those feeling exist.

The Narrator has witnessed many failing relationships in his young life so his outlook on love is not surprising. I think this rational is a coping mechanism to deal with the possibility of rejection. Proust is a recluse, he doesn’t have many friends and isn’t very handsome from what I’ve gathered, but the one thing he does have is knowledge. He has so much time to think that he rationalizes the shortcomings of his life through the objectification of women and failure of those around him. Since he feels that love will never last long because it cannot fully attach itself to another person he is commenting on his own intimacy issues and his reluctance to put trust in women.

But at the same time this could also mean that the possibilities to love are endless because if the emotion does not attach its self to people but instead manifests through people, the options are endless. The mortality of love could be comforting to him because when love comes to an end there is always the chance that new love will appear. He seems almost too aware of the fact that love is an individuals feeling at may more times that not, not be reciprocated. It seems that Proust craves unrequited love to a degree. He pines after the unavailable because he is then left to play out scenarios in his own mind about how things might go as oppose to putting himself out there and seeing if it could actually workout. He idolizes his crushes to the point where they aren’t even real anymore, they are art, something that cannot reciprocate human contact; therefore it is not real and cannot hurt him.