13. By now, I was around 500 pages into my journey...
The thirteenth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero waxes lyrical on the troublesome topics of love and belief.
By now, I was around 500 pages into my journey. But with Proust, this only feels like you’ve made it to, say, the end of your street, when your destination is Shanghai or Tokyo…
At times the sheer scale of the novel can be overwhelming. It’s a book that contains what often seem like endless passages in which nothing happens; dinner parties, luncheons, balls, and soirées that go on for page after page; scenarios that spiral off along seemingly unconnected tangents; the ‘corridor of corridors’ that Clive James speaks of. Because of this, there are countless times when you’ll want to throw in the towel; when, like a long and treacherous walk across inhospitable country, it will seem almost impossible to go on.
You must remember that Proust is always showing you something. You must remember that the signs and signifiers you see are there for a reason. You must try to extrapolate yourself from the sequence of parts to consider the whole. And you must accept the doubts you’re having, understand they’re simply momentary aberrations set within the larger experience of reading, which will soon be tempered by the discovery of a deep and majestic sentence such as this:
‘But when a belief vanishes, there survives it – more and more ardently, so as to cloak the absence of power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new phenomena – and idolatrous attachment to the old things which our belief in them did once animate, as if it was in that belief and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause – the death of the gods.’
It takes a while to work a passage like this out. At least it did for me. Reading Proust involves a continual wrangling with subordinate clauses and unpicking the strands of constantly deferred meanings. But go over it four or five times and it begins to reveal its magic. What the Narrator calls ‘belief’ might last a lifetime for some, but more commonly blooms and withers, subject to endless vacillations, transmutations, and seasonal adjustments. History is riddled with conversions, defections and apostasies that prove as much. The use of the word ‘idolatry’ is crucial, for it points us again towards Ruskin. Proust ultimately came to see in his great teacher an attachment to objects, artefacts, and to style, that he considered artistically and intellectually dubious, preferring instead the sensations and experiences they evoked over the things themselves. It meant that Ruskin was never again without that whiff of idolatry that Proust so disdained.
If we take Samuel Beckett at his word, then idolatry should be regarded as the bedfellow of ‘habit’, that stupefying force which binds us to the narrow realisms of our anthropomorphised world, in which objects dominate. It’s this placing of belief in the object which is the mistake we too often make. But the problem goes even deeper than that. The problem is with the very conception of the idea of ‘belief’ itself. By that, I mean the way in which we come to believe, not necessarily what we claim to believe, but in the act of believing itself. We place so much weight on this act: in believing that believing holds a kind of moral primacy, as if it validates everything and anything we want it to, when in fact the only certainty is the existence of this curious meta-belief, and perhaps not even that. This is where we can stray into justifying all sorts of wrong-headed actions simply by claiming that we were following our beliefs – and we’re all aware of where that can lead.
But isn’t this because our beliefs are so often motivated by unconscious fear, denial, or cowardice, rather than by some genuinely held conviction? We might perhaps also consider their cousins, opinions – those terrible, impish creatures who appear, as if from nowhere, to take a hold of our minds. Both opinions and beliefs can become deeply entrenched, and this usually results in damage at some point in our lives, either to ourselves or others, and usually both. But if we’re lucky, or bright, or open-hearted, they might just be banished by a deeper knowledge within us – the ‘divine spark’, a Jungian ‘belief without belief’, whereby reason reasons that unreason can be reasonable.
Hence the puzzling opposition between the vestige of belief and the ‘present incredulity’, as we struggle to comprehend the cause of the attenuation of any given belief, once so strongly felt, but now withering on the cerebral vine. Hence the ‘idolatrous attachment’ – the remnants of the belief in the belief – that mask the far greater and far simpler understanding of a universe in which the gods thrive, and rumours of their death are greatly exaggerated.
What this means for our belief in love is far from clear. Do we really believe in love, or do we just believe that we believe in love? If we declare to the world that we believe in love, does that in some way secretly diminish our actual belief in love? And does love itself require our belief, or is it just fine on its own thank you very much?
When the Travelling Companion first burst into my life, I was, superficially at least, appalled by the very idea of love and what it meant for the sorry souls caught within its iron grip. After the whole Maria episode, and the unedifying truths that experience had taught me about myself and others, I’d very quickly contrived an impassive demeanour when it came to matters of the heart. Because of this, I spent several months playing up my lack of interest in her, claiming to be busy when I wasn’t, to forget arrangements, and casually dismissing the tender shows of affection she made me when we were together. I even turned down sex, certain that the mechanisms of carnal lust were the ones that duped us into believing we were in love in the first place, and therefore best avoided.
In fact, I was deeply flattered by her attention, but had somehow convinced myself of two things: firstly, that, in the interests of self-protection, I’d risen above such base instincts, and secondly, that she wasn’t ‘my type’ anyway. It was true that in the beginning her ‘look’, which had an elegance and sophistication I couldn’t then appreciate, didn’t particularly appeal to me; and that soon after we met, I noticed certain physical peculiarities which perturbed me: her convex fingernails, a small scar on her chin, a beauty mark beneath her left eye, all of which became reasons for me to tell myself that she wasn’t ‘the one’.
With a different lover, more ‘my type’, doubtless my hollow refusals of physical intimacy would have melted away, like an early morning frost on a spring day. I’d have thoughtlessly picked up where I’d left off with Maria and that would have been that. But it never happened. Despite my denials, I’d recognised something special in the Travelling Companion almost straight away. She really was different from the amorphous crowd of undergraduates who’d passed my way thus far. There was a kind of soulful sorrow in her dark eyes, which would often transform into something else, proud, haughty, almost mischievous; something congruent with the fierce intelligence behind them. It was like she was closed and open at the same time. Like she’d somehow already cracked the code to this world. And her attention, affection and approbation was, in truth, precisely what I craved. So, what I really mean to say when I talk of my supposed dispassion, is that I was, not for the first time in my short life, full of shit.
Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.