To love love more than the object of love, to love passion for its own sake, has been to suffer and to court suffering…. Passionate love, the longing for what sears and annihilates us in its triumph—there is the secret which Europe … has always repressed.
Despite its tragic, even lugubrious, plot, in which everything goes wrong, and the lovers die in misery, the Tristan myth has been wildly successful through the ages. The ancients, the nineteenth-century Romantics, and we at the turn of the twentieth century all swoon over the beautiful melodies created by their passion. We like unhappy stories. We find it organically right that the lovers die. Why are passion and death so closely connected? Because we become most alive, most aware, on the brink of death—and we find that erotic. “The approach of death acts as a goad to sensuality,” de Rougemont writes. “In the full sense of the verb, it aggravates desire.”
Few things are as heady as an ordeal survived. The mind paints the sensory memory with lavish details, caressing each obstacle, savoring the mix of panic, hope, and dread. In crisis, emotions don’t replace one another, but exist side by side like the notes in a musical chord. Come alive! the brain instructs the terror-stricken body. When the calculations of defeat suddenly begin presenting themselves one by one, as hard evidence, every jot and iota matters. The color of the heaving swells, the burn of the rope running through one’s fingers—any part of it may figure in survival’s final frantic arithmetic. Questing for detail, the mind shifts to a state of heightened sensitivity in which the air becomes savory and sound is a forest. It is a kind of rapture to feel so alive, regardless of what prompted the awakening.
Even afterward, having survived, the mind remembers the ordeal almost lovingly, with obsessive delicacy, relish, and pinpoint awareness. That theme of here’s what it felt like when I nearly died, restaged in slow, horrific detail, has fed many works of art, from the Tristan myth to The Tempest to Moby-Dick. There is something about the sea that lends itself especially well to such accounts, maybe because the sea’s dark coma reminds us so much of the unconscious mind, a shadow world where irrationality lurks and motives are hidden.
When Tristan was campaigning, something about all those years’ worth of vivid sensory memories, left behind on a distant island, as if they were dreams he knew he had had but couldn’t quite remember, disturbed him viscerally. The loss was too great. He became obsessed all over again with his love for Iseult. Can one excavate the past? Is it possible to become reacquainted with our forgotten selves? At what point should one allow them to be castaways? Never, if what we really seek is not a person but a state of the most intense excitement, receptivity, and awareness. Even if it means death. As poet Wallace Stevens writes, “The pensive man … He sees that eagle float/For which the entire Alps are a single nest.” Without hurdles, the mind doesn’t take wing, and there can be no flights of passion. One of the best avenues to passion is adultery, whose timeless appeal shines in the ancient myth of Tristan and Iseult and other tales of forbidden love. We know the delicious bonfire that a dangerous love affair can ignite, and we long for that steep arousal. When we hear the Tristan myth, we dream the lover’s dream, crave the lover’s fire. We long to be every player in that violently thrilling hunt—the tracker, the wild animal, and the hunter—because we know it would take a drama that electrifying to drive the partridges of passion up into the open air and set the pulse running and dodging like a rabbit. Then we could use ourselves in every pore and cell, feel breathtakingly alive, be rocketed right out of our skins and hurled into a state of supernatural glory, where we feel as lusty and powerful as gods.
MARCEL PROUST AND THE EROTICS OF WAITING
To wait. To feel her ribs pressing against the walls of the chest and a hollow ache, as of someone knocking, in the vault of the stomach. The minute hand of her watch seems frozen. All of life’s processes stop; there is no birdsong or car engine. The world grows slack. Silence reigns. Yet her pulse is leaping like a frightened stag. She sits at the window, searching every movement on the street below, atomizing each face for the resemblance of her beloved. A flash of light hair sends her into ripples of delight, then disappointment, as she realizes it belongs to a stranger. A moss-green raincoat turns the corner—at last!—but no, it is only a businessman stopping by the bakery on his way home from work. Time after time, her senses signal and then betray her. By midmorning, when her lover finally arrives, she is exhausted from the sheer strain of anticipation. An old Chinese proverb warns: you should not confuse the sound of your heartbeat for the hooves of approaching horses.
A teenage girl, sitting beside a telephone, her back stiff with worry, her fingers twisting a strand of hair, nervously waits. A Victorian girl, doing embroidery or crochet of the most laborious kind—intricate eyelets and laces on napkins, pillowcases, petticoats, doilies, afghans, and nightgowns—passively waits. In theory, she is assembling items for her “hope chest,” but the real purpose is to fill the vacant hours of adolescence with busy work while she waits for the real work of love to begin. A contemporary woman hanging out in singles bars, placing romantic personals in a newspaper, joining a dating service, or going to a church dance, actively waits. Waiting for love is something we all do, and badly. The essence of waiting is that it makes us suffer. But suffering, remember, is a prerequisite for passion. Waiting for “Mr. or Ms. Right,” the “one true love,” that “special someone,” the “significant other” to enter your life has always preoccupied people and inspired works of art. In Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, we find the pathetic, dried-up Miss Havisham sitting among cobwebs in a decaying bridal gown, still waiting for the groom who left her standing at the altar … decades before. In a fairy tale which has appealed for generations, Sleeping Beauty waits in suspense for a hundred years until the handsome Prince arrives with an invigorating kiss. Then, at last, she can wake, breathe deeply, and start to live a meaningful life.
In the past, it was usually women who were depicted waiting for love, and as Stephen Kern points out in The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns, “Victorian art reveals the limits of women’s preparation for anything but love.” It is obsessed with the “iconography of waiting,” such as:
the sleeping women depicted all over Victorian art—under trees, at the edge of lakes, and on hammocks, beds, sofas, benches and grass…. Endlessly waiting women in voluptuous preparations were depicted in Roman baths or Middle Eastern marriage markets, slave auctions, and harems.
For most of history, women have spent so much time under lock and key as chattels that they were unable to leave home and search for love as men could. The fair maiden had to wait for the knight in shining armor to ride by, be wowed by her, and start courting. In that sense, they were starlets sitting at the counter of a Hollywood drugstore, hoping and praying to be discovered by a handsome mogul. Girls used to wait to see whom their family would choose for them. These days, both men and women wait for “karma,” “fate,” “destiny,” or some other temporal god to send a likely partner their way. Not for Cupid’s arrows exactly, but for time’s. They still believe in a magic force that commands the saga of one’s life.
The essence of waiting is wishing the future to be the present. For a slender moment or string of moments, time does a shadow dance, and the anticipated future is roped by the imagination and dragged into the present as if it really were the here and now. The here and now is made to last beyond its mortal limits. What can be controlled this instant, and only for this instant, is magically generalized into a sea of instants in the uncharted world of the future. The thrill of waiting comes from the pretended breaking of irrevocable boundaries. It is like being privy to life after death. Some people fear a high-speed future racing toward them, beyond human control, a mindless missile full of explosives. Others anticipate but do not fear the future, assuming it will be filled with both good and bad surprises. Both types of people wait for love, one more feverishly than the other. Most often, waiting becomes a delicious prelude to love, as two people re
unite in a flurry of reassurances and kisses.
For Marcel Proust, waiting had an erotics all its own, a delectation made all the sharper if the beloved never appeared. “The Midnight Sun,” his Parisian friends called him, because his hours were reversed: he slept by day and wrote or socialized by night. Chic, witty, wealthy, cheerful, dressed like a dandy, full of gossip, obsequious in the extreme, he moved among the highest echelons of Paris society, had crushes on older matrons, and wrote wonderful long letters to his friends; but he spent most of his life under covers in the cork-lined bedroom of his sumptuous apartment. He was frail and ill (he died of asthma at fifty-three), but he was also emotionally in retreat. Almost a hermit, he lived in a night land remote as deep space. It was there, in his palatial rut, propped up against exquisite pillows, eating mashed potatoes delivered from a favorite posh restaurant, that he created his masterpiece of embellished recollection, Remembrance of Things Past,* in which he tried to remember everyone he had known, every self he had been, every thing he had seen or done in his entire life. How can one convey the ampleness of being alive—all the people and emotions, animals, skies, sensations, and thoughts, as well as the subterranean life of the mind itself? His fictional frieze sprawls for three thousand pages, whole sections of which sing with the gorgeous music of the mind and heart, and are, appropriately, unforgettable. “He was a dream analyst,” Paul West writes in a homage to Proust, “a trance-conjurer, a scandal-savorer, a girl fondler, a boy cuddler, a matron stroker, a snob maven, a dealer in smart remarks, and a prodigious theorist of love, memory and imagination.”
Marcel Proust was born in Paris in 1871, at the climax of the Franco-Prussian War, a time of hideous deprivation, short rations, and disease. In desperation, the citizens of Paris ate dogs, cats, and rats to survive, and cholera epidemics blighted one neighborhood after another. Unable to get the nutrition she needed during pregnancy, his mother blamed herself for the child’s frail start in life. Soon she became pregnant again, and Marcel had a brother and a rival whom he resented and with whom he squabbled nonstop. But his mother coddled and fussed over him, lavishing special attention if he seemed ill, and each night reading grown-up books to him before he went to sleep, taking care to skip over the romantic passages. In time, he began to associate books with his mother, but he also learned that being ill extracted the most attention from her. It was as if, fearing that she had produced a diseased child, Jeanne-Clémence instinctively treated him as one, and her increased attentions as nurse-devotee led Marcel to act even more infirm. Mother and son formed this pact early on, and each identified powerfully with the other, excluding everyone else from their tight symbiotic circle. Nowadays we would perhaps describe Jeanne-Clémence as an “overprotective” mother, and wonder if Marcel’s asthma had psychological origins. Freud would most likely have suggested—as he did about Leonardo da Vinci—that Marcel’s evolving homosexuality had its origins in too close an identification with his mother, so that he ended up loving boys as she had loved him. In any case, Marcel was bedridden much of his childhood, often missing school, and it was his mother who nursed him during the time his father, a doctor, spent at the office. Throughout his life, Marcel and his mother exchanged frequent letters—even when they were living in the same house—and hers often end with ornate endearments of the sort shared by lovers. These were golden days of love and discovery for young Marcel, whom his mother teasingly called “my little wolf” because he devoured her care; it was a time when the sun always stood at noon, and he monopolized the love of the only perfect creature on earth.
The adult Proust didn’t search for childhood memories to mine. They came unbidden as manna, and he referred to them as “involuntary.” That is, they weren’t drafted for novelistic service, they just happened. But once they did appear, he turned each into a small forever, a mini-universe of inexhaustible study, a carousel of sensations. In Swann’s Way, to use the famous example, on a cold winter day, Marcel’s mother offers him some petites madeleines—scalloped-shaped little cakes—and tea. He soaks a morsel of cake in a spoonful of tea and raises it to his lips. When he tastes it a shudder runs through him, a gong sounds in his memory, and he is transported to his childhood visits with his aunt, who served him petites madeleines and lime-blossom tea. He retastes those plump little cakes, resmells those cups of fragrant tea. A dam has opened and a river of textures, atmospheres, sights, and sounds flows in. Blessed with a photographic memory and a passion for accurate detail, he is able to paint his sensations onto the reader’s mind so powerfully that each reader feels he has slipped into the room with Proust’s aunt and her maid, and become an intimate part of the scene, all alone, as if no one else on earth had ever read or imagined it. A voluptuous animist, Proust believed that memories hid like demons or sprites inside objects. One day you taste something special—or pass a tree, or see a bow tie—and the memory leaps out at you. When it does, it unlocks the door to all the memories surrounding it, and a sensory free-for-all ensues. The past is a lost city of Inca gold—complete with fabulous temples, quixotic rulers, mazy streets, and sacrifices—that can be discovered in all its grandeur.
You’d think such a sybarite would fare well in love, savoring every moment, celebrating small pleasures. As a boy, waiting for love, Marcel is as ready as an archer with a full quiver of arrows, when to his amazement a target suddenly appears in the form of a red-haired, freckled girl holding a trowel. She is standing beside a hedge of jasmine, and he’s overwhelmed by her succulent, fragrant aura. They exchange a glance deep as a long kiss, and he experiences her with all of his senses open. He can feel his soul swim to her and blend with hers, experiencing what Freud would later call the “oceanic feeling” of love,* and he wants to possess her, though he knows full well that nothing—not even sexual or mystic union—can solve the problem of how alone and separate we all feel.
As an adult, the narrator falls in love with a certain Albertine, a dark-haired, unremarkable-looking girl of the lower middle class (“let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination”) whom he adores, and who ultimately decides to leave him. She is fickle and runs off to carouse with both male and female lovers. He tries to entice her back by offering to buy her a Rolls-Royce and a yacht. She agrees, only to be thrown by a horse and killed before she has chance to return. In much of Remembrance, the narrator obsesses about Albertine with a fascination as disquieting and automatic as a hacking cough. She is the central planet in an unknown solar system. Every object she touches offers a glimpse of a bright new world. Fixated on her bicycle, her “pale cheeks like white slugs,” the dust that she stirs when she moves, he becomes consumed with possessive jealousy and grief. Every face reminds him of hers. Every object is a trip wire to an explosively painful memory. She is perpetually present in her absence. And that really is Proust’s point about love, that it doesn’t exist in real time, only in anticipated time or remembered time. The only paradise is the one that’s been lost. Love requires absence, obstacles, infidelities, jealousy, manipulation, outright lies, pretend reconciliations, tantrums, and betrayals. Meanwhile the lovers fret, hope, agonize, and dream. Torment whips them to a higher level of feeling, and from that mental froth comes love. Love is not a biological instinct, not an evolutionary imperative, but a feat of the imagination which thrives on difficulty. In The Sweet Cheat Gone, the narrator remembers how Albertine delicately cuddled with him face-to-face, entwining her eyelashes with his, and he nearly swoons at the memory of such intimate, delicate togetherness. But he also recalls feeling utterly powerless and trapped at that moment.
When the narrator confides that his passion for Albertine is really a reshaping of his childhood love for his mother, he sounds classically Freudian. He even confesses that none of his mistresses has loved him as dearly or made him as happy as his mother, whose love was absolute and dependable, a fixed point on the compass rose of his childhood. There are many parallels in Remembrance to Freudian thought, and though Proust may have encountered Freud’s work, the
re is no suggestion in his letters or other writings that he did. What makes his obsession with his mother so fascinating today is that it was an innocently occurring—if extreme—example of a child’s total fixation on one parent, what Freud labeled the Oedipus complex. But Proust’s general views about love differ greatly from Freud’s. Whereas Freud believes sublimated sex is the origin of love, Proust does not see love as a warped or disguised or reconstituted sex drive. For him, sex is an integral part of love because it encourages intimacy—but love springs from a need all its own. Love is not something you inherit; you must search for it. Why is it precious? Because it is the great enabler that allows us to commune with every aspect of being alive, with people and objects, animals and cities. One needs love to feel harmonious, to feel part of the rich landscape of one’s life. That’s why, when the narrator most appreciates the natural world, he simultaneously yearns for a woman to love. By loving a person and nature at the same time, he is able to heighten his passion for both. It puts his senses on active duty, smacks him to attention, and makes him ultrareceptive to every nuance around him. A forest is never drab, but when one is in love it throbs with even more color and sound. The beloved becomes an embodiment of that forest, and one can transfer all one’s sexual energy, devotion, and sheer rapture to the forest itself. It’s as if sexual excitement were a hard currency of the brain that you can spend wherever you wish.
Ecstasy is what everyone craves—not love or sex, but a hot-blooded, soaring intensity, in which being alive is a joy and a thrill. That enravishment doesn’t give meaning to life, and yet without it life seems meaningless. This results from the treachery of habit, a particularly insidious thug who chokes passion and smothers love. Habit puts us on autopilot. Proust uses the example of walking through one’s house in the dark—one doesn’t actually see the furniture in the hallway, but one knows where it is and instinctively avoids it. When we finally possess someone we start to take them for granted, and passion soon wanes. Only the inaccessible and elusive is truly alluring. Each person is attracted over and over again to a predictable “type” of lover. Each has a habitual pattern of loving, and of losing: “The men who have been left by a number of women have been left almost always in the same manner because of their character and of certain always identical reactions which can be calculated: each man has his own way of being betrayed …”
A Natural History of Love Page 15