10 February

Today's Proust. More on love, a big topic. Each person is an absolutely singular, unknowable being. In love, and especially in its early stages, this is forgotten, and most of the qualities we say we love in somebody else are projections from ourselves. There are so many quotes that draw this out really well, just a few below. (Some think Proust devalues love, but in fact he was making it something much bigger. Love should be living the differences between you and somebody else, rather than imagined sameness.) "Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us." “The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.” "Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.” "The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections.” “Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.” "For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety. ”