In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [108]
The first of January was exceptionally painful to me that winter. So, no doubt, is everything that marks a date and an anniversary, when we are unhappy. But if our unhappiness is due to the loss of someone dear to us, our suffering consists merely in an unusually vivid comparison of the present with the past. Added to this, in my case, was the unformulated hope that Gilberte, having wished to leave me to take the first steps towards a reconciliation, and discovering that I had not taken them, had been waiting only for the excuse of New Year’s Day to write to me, saying: “What is the matter? I’m mad about you, so come and have it out frankly, I can’t live without seeing you.” As the last days of the old year went by, such a letter began to seem probable. It was, perhaps, nothing of the sort, but to make us believe that such a thing is probable the desire, the need that we have for it suffices. The soldier is convinced that a certain interval of time, capable of being indefinitely prolonged, will be allowed him before the bullet finds him, the thief before he is caught, men in general before they have to die. That is the amulet which preserves people—and sometimes peoples—not from danger but from the fear of danger, in reality from the belief in danger, which in certain cases allows them to brave it without actually needing to be brave. It is confidence of this sort, and with as little foundation, that sustains the lover who is counting on a reconciliation, on a letter. For me to cease to expect a reconciliation, it would have sufficed that I should have ceased to wish for one. However indifferent to us we may know the beloved to be, we attribute to her a series of thoughts (though their sum-total be indifference), the intention to express those thoughts, a complication of her inner life in which one is the object of her antipathy, perhaps, but also of her constant attention. But to imagine what was going on in Gilberte’s mind I should have required simply the power to anticipate on that New Year’s Day what I should feel on the first day of any of the following years, when the attention or the silence or the affection or the coldness of Gilberte would pass almost unnoticed by me and I should not dream, should not even be able to dream, of seeking a solution to problems which would have ceased to perplex me. When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other’s feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.
New Year’s Day went by, hour after hour, without bringing me that letter from Gilberte. And as I received a few others containing greetings belated or retarded by the congestion of the mails at that season, on the third and fourth of January I still hoped, but more and more faintly. On the days that followed, I wept a great deal. True, this was due to the fact that, having been less sincere than I thought in my renunciation of Gilberte, I had clung to the hope of a letter from her in the New Year. And seeing that hope exhausted before I had had time to shelter myself behind another, I suffered like an invalid who has emptied his phial of morphia without having another within his reach. But perhaps also in my case—and these two explanations are not mutually exclusive, for a single feeling is often made up of contrary elements—the hope that I entertained of ultimately receiving a letter had brought to my mind’s eye once again the image of Gilberte, had reawakened the emotions which the expectation of finding myself in her presence, the sight of her, her behaviour towards me, had aroused in me before. The immediate possibility of a reconciliation