19 May

More love, because it’s a lovely topic. Proust is valuable because he allows us to strip away what Greer called the ‘wretched cant’ of love. The self-motivated projections we put onto other people, that are really about us, not them. Another Proustian insight was that each love we feel for somebody else or they feel for us carries a history of desires within it, all of our past loves. And more than that, we even inherit loves from our parents and their ancestors, we learn how to love from them, and so the series of loves that make up our lives go back generations, our relationships are in part still all the relationships they had (which we know about trauma, that it passes down, but we rarely think about love being the same). When we love or are loved, it’s a crowd of people there, not just two. “For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.”