Intermission: Time Regained?
"It was that notion of the embodiment of Time, the inseparableness from us of the past that I now had the intention of bringing strongly into relief in my work."
This essay is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on Modernism and its future in the 21st Century and beyond. Each essay forms parts of the Nostomodernist project: a quasi-scholarly attempt at reevaluating what it means to be Modern in contemporary times, to possibly reconcile the gap between Modernism and its successors, and to speculate on new trajectories within the current era of history.
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Diane,
I dedicate these three essays to you, given that you were extraordinary enough to inspire them, and to reveal that I too was extraordinary, having been able to write them because of you—I leave them as a memory of our dancing days.
Thomas
Time Regained
“There is nothing more painful than the contrast between the alteration in beings and the fixity of memory, than the realisation that what our memory keeps green has decayed and that there can be no exterior approach to the beauty within us which causes so great a yearning to see it once more.”
In the seventh volume of the French writer, Marcel Proust’s, In Search Of Lost Time, as translated by Sydney Schiff, the Narrator has spent many years in a sanatorium, and returns to meet his friends and acquaintances of the previous volumes in very changed circumstances. Many of them have died or grown old, such that he cannot recognise many of them at first, when he visits the estate of the Princess de Guermantes in Combray, and the gap of time stokes the memories of his past, in the involuntary fashion of remembrance, such that by the end of his stay, he resolves to write a novel that will encompass everything he loved in his life and wished to preserve by his memories, so that he will not lose them when he realises he is beginning to, and thus he is finally able to confidence himself into the task of art, which eventually becomes the great novel of Proust himself, so that these memories might live forever and so will he.
By the end of this volume, each instance of involuntary memory is now a grappling with oblivion; such was his response to the reunion with a novel by the French writer, George Sand, in the Guermantes’ library, which his grandmother once gifted to him and his mother once read aloud to him during his childhood in Combray, in the first volume, Swann’s Way—“And yet to open those books read formerly only to look at the images which did not then adorn them would seem to me so dangerous that even in that sense, the only one I understand, I should not be tempted to become a bibliophile. I know too well how easily the images left by the mind are effaced by the mind. It replaces the old ones by new which have not the same power of resurrection. And if I still had the François le Champi which my mother selected one day from the parcel of books my grandmother was to give me for my birthday, I would never look at it; I should be too much afraid that, little by little, my impressions of to-day would insert themselves in it and blot out the earlier ones, I should be too fearful of its becoming so much a thing of the present that when I asked it to evoke again the child who spelt out its title in the little room at Combray, that child, unable to recognise its speech, would no longer respond to my appeal and would be for ever buried in oblivion.”
Quoting its significance from the first volume, “My agony was soothed; I let myself be borne upon the current of this gentle night on which I had my mother by my side. I knew that such a night could not be repeated; that the strongest desire I had in the world, namely, to keep my mother in my room through the sad hours of darkness, ran too much counter to general requirements and to the wishes of others for such a concession as had been granted me this evening to be anything but a rare and casual exception. Tomorrow night I should again be the victim of anguish and Mamma would not stay by my side. But when these storms of anguish grew calm I could no longer realise their existence; besides, tomorrow evening was still a long way off.”
His grandmother and mother are now long-dead, and what remains of the dead are tied to objects, such as they remain like little closets of time, waiting to be reopened with the dust and scents of old pasts suddenly plunged out and everywhere, and sometimes they open by themselves without an object, such as when he calls out for Albertine while resting in Tansonville—”Once I left Gilberte early and in the middle of the night, while still half-asleep, I called Albertine. I had not been thinking or dreaming of her, nor had I mistaken her for Gilberte. My memory had lost its love for Albertine but it seems there must be an involuntary memory of the limbs, pale and sterile imitation of the other, which lives longer as certain mindless animals or plants live longer than man. The legs, the arms are full of blunted memories; a reminiscence germinating in my arm had made me seek the bell behind my back, as I used to in my room in Paris and I had called Albertine, imagining my dead friend lying beside me as she so often did at evening when we fell asleep together, counting the time it would take Françoise to reach us, so that Albertine might without imprudence pull the bell I could not find.”
At this point in the novel, the ending of World War One has brought the Narrator closer to late modernity, out of the peace of La Belle Époque—which situates the previous volumes—and closer to the uncertainty of the postmodern world caused by the destructive forces of World War Two; there is a sense of death and change in the world, such that there is an irreversibility of situation, and thus the parallel between the Great War and the party at the Guermantes estate is the immanence of the lost past, or the bareness of its material destruction by both time and human beings, such that older times can only be recalled with objects and their memories and dreams and involuntary illuminations, and even the survivors are ravaged by the threat of time and further oblivion.
But speaking of illuminations, the precise moment that the Narrator believes in his literary purpose is his stumbling along the paving stones of the Guermantes’ courtyard: “But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years—and it opens. […] As I recovered myself, one of my feet stepped on a flagstone lower than the one next it. In that instant all my discouragement disappeared and I was possessed by the same felicity which at different moments of my life had given me the view of trees which seemed familiar to me during the drive round Balbec, the view of the belfries of Martinville, the savour of the madeleine dipped in my tea and so many other sensations of which I have spoken and which Vinteuil’s last works had seemed to synthesise. As at the moment when I tasted the madeleine, all my apprehensions about the future, all my intellectual doubts, were dissipated. Those doubts which had assailed me just before, regarding the reality of my literary gifts and even regarding the reality of literature itself were dispersed as though by magic. […] And then, all at once, I recognised that Venice which my descriptive efforts and pretended snapshots of memory had failed to recall; the sensation I had once felt on two uneven slabs in the Baptistry of St. Mark had been given back to me and was linked with all the other sensations of that and other days which had lingered expectant in their place among the series of forgotten years from which a sudden chance had imperiously called them forth.”
However, it is the encounter with the young Mademoiselle de Saint-Loup, the daughter of Gilberte Swann and Robert de Saint-Loup—the latter having perished in the war—which constitutes the final instance of involuntary memory in the novel—“I saw Gilberte coming towards me. I, to whom Saint-Loup’s marriage and all the concern it then gave me (as it still did) were of yesterday, was astonished to see beside her a young girl whose tall, slight figure marked the lapse of time to which I had, until now, been blind. […] However, Mlle de Saint-Loup stood before me. […] The soul of the Guermantes’ had vanished but the charming head with the piercing eyes of a bird on the wing was poised upon her shoulders and threw me, who had known her father, into a dream. She was so beautiful, so promising. Gaily smiling, she was made out of all the years I had lost; she symbolised my youth.”
What immediately follows is an epiphany, by the Narrator, on the difficulty and yet necessity of his great literary project, such that he might resist against the flows of time the memories of his life, his friends and everything he holds dear, such that art and the process of memory is what saves ourselves in the final monuments before the oblivion of time—“Finally, this idea of Time had the ultimate value of the hand of a clock. It told me it was time to begin if I meant to attain that which I had felt in brief flashes on the Guermantes’ side and during my drives with Mme de Villeparisis, that indefinable something which had made me think life worth living. How much more so now that it seemed possible to illuminate that life lived in darkness, at last to make manifest in a book the truth one ceaselessly falsifies. Happy the man who could write such a book. What labour awaited him. To convey its scope would necessitate comparison with the noblest and most various arts. For the writer, in creating each character, would have to present it from conflicting standpoints so that his book should have solidity, he would have to prepare it with meticulous care, perpetually regrouping his forces as for an offensive, to bear it as a load, to accept it as the object of his life, to build it like a church, to follow it like a régime, to overcome it like an obstacle, to win it like a friendship, to nourish it like a child, to create it like a world, mindful of those mysteries which probably only have their explanation in other worlds, the presentiment of which moves us most in life and in art. Parts of such great books can be no more than sketched for time presses and perhaps they can never be finished because of the very magnitude of the architect’s design. How many great cathedrals remain unfinished? Such a book takes long to germinate, its weaker parts must be strengthened, it has to be watched over, but afterwards it grows of itself, it designates our tomb, protects it from evil report and somewhat against oblivion.”
Stepping outside a restaurant at Rivebelle later, the then-intoxicated Narrator is steeply made aware that his thoughts—the precious and immanent phenomenology of himself—are contingent and harboured by his physical body, such that he becomes fearful and anxious of either a brain haemorrhage or an accident which could render to oblivion the precious memories he has yet to pen down.
As he writes, “And my memory was impaired. […] In my lighthearted gaiety I was neither prudent nor apprehensive. It mattered little to me that this happy thought flew away in a second and disappeared in the void. But now it was no longer so because the joy I experienced was not derived from a subjective nervous tension which isolates us from the past, but, on the contrary, from an extension of the consciousness in which the past, recreated and actualised, gave me, alas but for a moment, a sense of eternity. I wished that I could leave this behind me to enrich others with my treasure. […] I was no longer indifferent as when I returned from Rivebelle; I felt myself enlarged by this work I bore within me (like something precious and fragile, not belonging to me, which had been confided to my care and which I wanted to hand over intact to those for whom it was destined). And to think that when, presently, I returned home, an accident would suffice to destroy my body and that my lifeless mind would have for ever lost the ideas it now contained and anxiously preserved within its shaky frame before it had time to place them in safety within the covers of a book. […] The fear of no longer existing had formerly horrified me at each new love I experienced—for Gilberte, for Albertine—because I could not bear the thought that one day the being who loved them might not be there; it was a sort of death. But the very recurrence of this fear led to its changing into calm confidence. […] And now that it had been for a while indifferent to me I began fearing it anew, in another form, it is true, not for myself but for my book for the achievement of which that life, menaced by so many dangers, was, at least, for a period, indispensable. Victor Hugo says: “The grass must grow and children die.” I say that the cruel law of art is that beings die and that we ourselves must die after we have exhausted suffering so that the grass, not of oblivion but of eternal life, should grow, fertilised by works upon which generations to come will gaily picnic without care of those who sleep beneath it.”
His confidence with death, which had enamelled itself with time—again and again—with every passing love and effort of romance, such that he had distanced himself so far as to no longer know the person who had loved them, as if the memory were connected with some other body and not his own, is in other words shaken by the brittle nature of his memories, which he comes to mind, while considering his mortality and the death of his grandmother—“When presently I went back home by the Champs Elysées who could say that I should not be struck down by the same evil as my grandmother when, one day she came for a walk with me which was to be her last, without her ever dreaming of such a thing, in that ignorance which is our lot when the hand of the clock reaches the moment when the spring is released that strikes the hour.”
His fears culminate with the final pages of the novel, following several scares on staircases, such that he begins to cling to the banisters, as an omen of his failing health and the urgency of his artistic task, mirroring Proust and his own waning condition, which prevented him from finishing the final three volumes of his great work in his real lifetime—and which this series of essays is referenced to—before his real death in 1922 at the age of fifty-one.
He reflects on his own attitude towards death here: “I do not think that the day when I became moribund, it was the accompanying factors such as the impossibility of going downstairs, of remembering a name, of getting up, which had by unconscious reasoning given me the idea that I was already all but dead, but rather that it had all come together, that the great mirror of the spirit reflected a new reality. […] In my case it was not the farewell of a dying man to his wife that I had to write, it was something longer and addressed to more than one person. Long to write! At best I might attempt to sleep during the day-time. If I worked it would only be at night but it would need many nights perhaps a hundred, perhaps a thousand. And I should be harassed by the anxiety of not knowing whether the Master of my destiny, less indulgent than the Sultan Sheriar, would, some morning when I stopped work, grant a reprieve until the next evening. Not that I had the ambition to reproduce in any fashion the Thousand and One Nights, anymore than the Mémoires of Saint-Simon, they too written by night, nor any of the books I had so much loved and which superstitiously attached to them in my childish simplicity as I was to my later loves, I could not, without horror, imagine different from what they were. […] Doubtless my books, like my fleshly being, would, some day, die. But one must resign oneself to death. One accepts the thought that one will die in ten years and one’s books in a hundred. Eternal duration is no more promised to works than to men. It might perhaps be a book as long as the Thousand and One Nights but very different. It is true that when one loves a work one would like to do something like it but one must sacrifice one’s temporal love and not think of one’s taste but of a truth which does not ask what our preferences are and forbids us to think of them. And it is only by obeying truth that one may some day encounter what one has abandoned and having forgotten the Arabian Nights or the Mémoires of Saint-Simon have written their counterpart in another period. But had I still time? Was it not too late?”.
There are numerously beautiful passages in the novel; the greatest of them are derived from memories and the wandering thoughts of philosophy, in the smallest moments with tinges of despair and desperation, which in time, become impotent as memories and so to speak have lost their faith—over time, the Narrator has ceased to remember Albertine as he loved her, although he mentions her continuously, even to the end, as if he cannot forget her and yet as he cannot remember her, and which he nevertheless wishes to explore again and again, like a ring of meaningfulness he must not let go.
In coming to the end of the novel, and therefore, to the end of the trilogy of essays I have laboured to write, and to express as it were the journey of the Narrator in parallel to the journey of myself, in love and out of love and moved by love, I ask you to indulge here with the passage near the end of Proust’s last work, or better yet, to attempt to read the entire novel yourself, if not this—“And often I asked myself not only whether there was still time but whether I was in a condition to accomplish my work. […] Illness had undermined my strength and, as I had long noticed, had sapped the power of my memory when I ceased to love Albertine. And was not the recreation of the memory of impressions it was afterwards necessary to fathom, to illuminate, to transform into intellectual equivalents, one of the conditions, almost the essential condition, of a work of art such as I had conceived just now in the library? […] At that very moment, in the Prince de Guermantes’ mansion, I heard the sound of my parents’ footsteps and the metallic, shrill, fresh echo of the little bell which announced M. Swann’s departure and the coming of my mother up the stairs; I heard it now, its very self, though its peal rang out in the far distant past. […] So that ringing must always be there and with it, between it and the present, all that indefinable past unrolled itself which I did not know I had within me. When it rang I already existed and since, in order that I should hear it still, there could be no discontinuity, I could have had no instant of repose or of non-existence, of nonthinking, of non-consciousness, since that former instant clung to me, for I could recover it, return to it, merely by plunging more deeply into myself. It was that notion of the embodiment of Time, the inseparableness from us of the past that I now had the intention of bringing strongly into relief in my work. And it is because they thus contain the past that human bodies can so much hurt those who love them, because they contain so many memories, so many joys and desires effaced within them but so cruel for him who contemplates and prolongs in the order of time the beloved body of which he is jealous, jealous to the point of wishing its destruction. For after death Time leaves the body and memories—indifferent and pale—are obliterated in her who exists no longer and soon will be in him they still torture, memories which perish with the desire of the living body. I had a feeling of intense fatigue when I realised that all this span of time had not only been lived, thought, secreted by me uninterruptedly, that it was my life, that it was myself, but more still because I had at every moment to keep it attached to myself, that it bore me up, that I was poised on its dizzy summit, that I could not move without taking it with me. The day on which I heard the distant, far-away sound of the bell in the Combray garden was a land-mark in that enormous dimension which I did not know I possessed. I was giddy at seeing so many years below and in me as though I were leagues high.”
I felt similar feelings when I read the Irish writer, James Joyce, and his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1961), which was a Künstlerroman I read as a teenager, and which has affected me so significantly that I often revisit this singular passage, which I once transcribed into a love letter, and which I also quote in full for the cause of posterity and time.
Indulge me once more: “There was a long rivulet in the strand and, as he waded slowly up its course, he wondered at the endless drift of seaweed. Emerald and black and russet and olive, it moved beneath the current, swaying and turning. The water of the rivulet was dark with endless drift and mirrored the highdrifting clouds. The clouds were drifting above him silently and silently the seatangle was drifting below him and the grey warm air was still and a new wild life was singing in his veins. Where was his boyhood now? Where was the soul that had hung back from her destiny, to brood alone upon the shame of her wounds and in her house of squalor and subterfuge to queen it in faded cerements and in wreaths that withered at the touch? Or where was he? He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the air. A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slateblue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird’s, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some darkplumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face. She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and a faint flame trembled on her cheek. —Heavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy. He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him. Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on! He halted suddenly and heard his heart in the silence. How far had he walked? What hour was it? There was no human figure near him nor any sound borne to him over the air. But the tide was near the turn and already the day was on the wane. He turned landward and ran towards the shore and, running up the sloping beach, reckless of the sharp shingle, found a sandy nook amid a ring of tufted sandknolls and lay down there that the peace and silence of the evening might still the riot of his blood. He felt above him the vast indifferent dome and the calm processes of the heavenly bodies; and the earth beneath him, the earth that had borne him, had taken him to her breast. He closed his eyes in the languor of sleep. His eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth and her watchers, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world. His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than the other. Evening had fallen when he woke and the sand and arid grasses of his bed glowed no longer. He rose slowly and, recalling the rapture of his sleep, sighed at its joy. He climbed to the crest of the sandhill and gazed about him. Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of skyline, the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand; and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools.”
I quote this passage from Joyce, and from the other passages of Proust, because I too desire to write similar passages in my life; following the inspirations of a single woman, I have followed my thoughts so far as they could go, leading me through the ins-and-outs of a literary journey into the underworld of my love and grief, such that I return to the surface at the time where my spirit has recovered enough of itself, and has distanced itself far enough, that I look back on the steppes of Mount Purgatory and feel the thistles of love once more.
As with Proust, I am beginning to forget the aspects of my love, although the essence remains unchanged, such that the passage of time, either accelerated or retarded by purpose, is a morphology that I have catalogued in its descent towards oblivion, and yet I have chosen to preserve its flavour, like the passage by Joyce, here in the intensity which it wrought me, so as to be able to say, as I said in The Fugitive, I felt this way once in my life.
Likewise, I extend to you this proof: you are not alone in the world and I have bared every intention to prove this to you as a proposition. Even if the circumstances are eroded and changed, the essence remains that it is possible to have loved you, and to have loved you so greatly that I reenacted the same essence as Proust to codify you, as other writers have codified their great loves—as I wrote before and rewrite for emphasis—in the only method of embalming we know—and which I double-embalm for Proust and Joyce: to offer you in words to the graces of eternity, and to shed the tears I could not bear to offer as lovely words and pages, so that I might prove to you and to time itself, if both ever should forget, that you once existed as love—I love you.
“Even had that page of the Goncourts not enlightened me, I knew how often I had been unable to give my attention to things or to people, whom afterwards, once their image had been presented to me in solitude by an artist, I would have gone leagues and risked death to rediscover.”
As the Austrian psychiatrist, Viktor E. Frankl, wrote in his 1946 memoir, Man's Search for Meaning, as translated by Ilse Lasch, “Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.”
It would be egregious to compare, as if they were morally-comparable, the experiences of the concentration camps of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz and two others to the relative comforts of heartbreak and grief in our peacetime; however, it is precisely because the conclusions of Frankl were created out of such stark conditions that they will always be relevant universal, insofar there are few lesser experiences that we could ignore as if had no truth to tell us.
Unlike the other essays, this essay has ceased to be an interplay of ideas; it is a confession which I choose to close now, because it took me over 30,000 words to stop speaking about you, and if I need to speak again, with an involuntary stroke of memory, I have no qualms to admit that there is nothing I have left to say, except that which I have stolen from here, and reiterate endlessly, such that here is the embodiment of a thousand years, such that someone else could live in my place, once we are long departed from it, and say that this essay is a tomb inscribed with how much I love you.
And I leave nothing behind for you, other than to say, I love you; I have expressed to you everything I believe to exist in you, such that I cannot be accused of saying less, or believing in you as any lesser, but only that I believed in you so much, that there is a potential in yourself, which surrounds you in every which way you gaze at the world, such that you give me the universe, and that I have thrown to you every hope of mine and pray that you will discover the universe of yourself, which I show and love about you, such that I can write about them here, because you once followed me into the stars.
In other words, you are sacred to me, or what the French writer, Michel Leiris, wrote in his 1938 essay, The Sacred in Everyday Life, for the College of Sociology by the French philosopher, Georges Bataille; that “if l gather together all these things taken from what was, for the time when I was a child, my everyday life, then bit by bit I can see an image taking shape of what, for me, is the sacred. Something marvellous, like the different attributes of my father or the great house made of rocks. Something strange, like the clothes the jockeys wore for the race, or certain exotic-sounding words. Something dangerous, like the red-hot coals or the scrubland of bush and thickets scattered with prowlers. Something ambiguous, like the coughing fits that bring on rending pains but also transform the sufferer into a tragic hero. Something forbidden, like the parlour where the adults perform their rituals. Something secret, like the conventicles held amidst the stench of the lavatory. Something dizzying, like the leaps of galloping horses or the false-bottomed boxes of language. Something that, when all is said and done, I can scarcely conceive of otherwise unless it is marked, in some way or another, by the supernatural. If one of the most “sacred” aims a man can set him self is to acquire as precise and intense an understanding of himself as is possible, then it seems desirable that each of us, by scrutinising our memories with the greatest possible honesty, should examine whether we can discover some sign amongst them that might enable us to discern for our part which colour holds the very notion of sacred.”
And I leave my sacred here, in the mountain hearth of my words, which I have fashioned from the austerity of our experience, and pulled from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and planted in the earth so that it may sow another tree, and that I may learn how to grow it too, and raise into an orchard of admirable fruits, which we could admire but never partake in the Garden together, tall and strong in the sunlight of our time—I still tend to this Eden because I love you.
“Between ourselves, do you believe that until now they have cared much about psychology or that even now they are capable of proving they possess any? But, believe me, I am not exaggerating.”
As the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, wrote in his 1989 book, The Sublime Object of Ideology, that “This is also the basic paradox of love: not only of one's country, but also of a woman or a man. If I am directly ordered to love a woman, it is clear that this does not work: in a way, love must be free. But on the other hand, if I proceed as if I really have a free choice, if I start to look around and say to myself 'Let's choose which of these women I will fall in love with', it is clear that this also does not work, that it is not 'real love'. The paradox of love is that it is a free choice, but a choice which never arrives in the present—it is always already made. At a certain moment, I can only state retroactively that I've already chosen.”
This is for you and me; I remain to say that I have said everything I wished; and for you, to say that you have seen everything I loved about you; and hence, that I have lived my life according to that which I could die and leave without regrets; and I ask if you will, without weakness and only the love, live your own way too?
I chose you; therefore, there is something about you, which I chose to love and to believe in, and that this freedom to love is made worthwhile by the very act of choosing to love; which is to say, to have freedom is to choose—and that not to choose is effectively to have no choice whatsoever. In other words, sheer freedom is the same as sheer imprisonment; and our freedom to choose is justified by our having chosen, because I fundamentally have no reason to love you, but I do and I chose to do so.
It demonstrates to me that I could love the Real of you—the inaccessible and yet traumatic parts of you, which will forever be unapproachable to me, and yet I could love you nonetheless, in such totality of ignorance and limitation and belief—to the point of faith, sola fide.
“I then returned, as will be seen, to a very different Paris from the Paris where I returned in August, 1914, when I underwent medical examination, after which I went back to the sanatorium.”
And yet, I know that I address these to Diane and not to you; I point these criticisms to the phantom skulking in the corners of my memories, who you once asked me to name, and yet it is these same memories which I occupy as the man to whom you showed love, and whose head you once held and gazed and looked away from, and you are the woman in those memories to whom I also showed loved and embraced and kissed, and those memories are real in the way that my words are not, so I abandon my words.
I step out of the palace of words, which I retreated into out of grief, because the palace is no longer on the Earth, and I step into the palace of memories, and look to the immanence of those hundreds of moments, which obliterate my thoughts and my alien words as memories of the real—I was there with you.
However, I have found you again, and I have broken the spell of my thoughts for the realness of you; I have strung together the personas of my memories and the person who still lives in this world, reconciling the rational and the material of you and me into the real, and thus deliver a simple and instinctual invitation: I love you.
“I had called Albertine, imagining my dead friend lying beside me as she so often did at evening when we fell asleep together, counting the time it would take Françoise to reach us, so that Albertine might without imprudence pull the bell I could not find.”
Once: there was a young woman who was searching for the stars, because she felt that her life on the Earth was not enough, and she wondered if there was more in the universe, but she could not bring herself to leave the Earth, having lived there for so long, and without any sight of the stars, except when she dreamt of them.
One day, a young man entered her life, and said I have searched for the stars and found them, so let me take you to them, because I know you would love them too. But she was not ready to leave the Earth, because she had tied her life to its surface, and so she could not leave, until her life on the Earth died as some things on the Earth die, and she mourned its death while still searching for the stars.
Some years later, the young man entered her life again, and by chance, he managed to show her the stars, and in that moment, when he looked at her, he saw the universe in her eyes and fell in love with her, and said to himself, I see the stars in your eyes and could gaze into them forever, because with you, I could already have the universe.
And so while she was still tethered to the Earth, he said let me take you, and she let him take her, and out of love, he gave her the universe, or their flight into the stars.
But when he grew afraid that she would fall, Orpheus turned his back to pull her closer to him, and said I love you more than the Earth, and at that moment, he saw her fall back to the Earth, and in his grief, the young man flew higher and searched the stars for her, as if I were searching all over the Earth, because he had lost the universe in her eyes, in that moment, when she left for the same Earth where she had still searched for the stars—the end of the parable.
I remember that you once called me a knight, a gentleman and a romantic. I also remember that when I was younger, I was afraid of dying, such that everything in my life has been a flight into the stars, away from my fear of death, because when I die, I want to have lived a life so passionate that it made the effort of life worth living, and thus I would prefer a short life of indescribable passion to a long and safe one.
With you, I felt that I could love you past death, like a skeleton in a grave, still reaching for a kiss, or that the annihilation of love which attempts to slip past death, and reach into eternity, because of the universe we could give to each other like doubled flames who found one another—like the universe I saw in your eyes in that library, and which I fell in love with, when I saw them again and again, in your room and mine. And if I have now closed my eyes and closed my mouth, could I still whisper with silence my simplest desire to you?
So, whisper in the ear of your beloved: let us love each other—you and I—together.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2022. All rights reserved.