But since we live our lives detached from individual beings, since after a few years our strongest feelings, such as had been my love for my grandmother and for Albertine, are forgotten, since they mean no more to us than words we cannot understand, since we can talk about these dead people with society acquaintances in houses we still frequent with pleasure even though everything we loved is dead, then, if there is a way for us to learn to understand these forgotten words, ought we not to use it, even if it entails first transcribing them into a universal, but at least therefore permanent, language, and thereby making out of those who are no longer with us, in their truest essence, an acquisition of lasting value for all human beings? Indeed, if we could succeed in explaining the law of change which made these words unintelligible to us, would not our weakness become a new kind of strength?

  In addition to that, the work to which our sorrows have contributed may be interpreted, so far as our future is concerned, both as a baneful sign of suffering and as an auspicious sign of consolation. Indeed, when we say that the loves and sorrows of a poet have been useful to him, have helped him to build up his work, when unknown women who never had the slightest idea that they might, by an act of malice here, or a mocking remark there, each have brought their stone to the construction of the monument which they will never see, we tend to forget that the writer’s life does not come to an end with this work, that the temperament which has caused him to have these sufferings, the ones that have entered into his work, will still be his when the work is finished, will make him love other women in conditions which would be almost identical, if all the modifications which time brings to circumstances did not result in slight variations, in the subject himself, in his appetite for love and in his resistance to pain. From this first point of view, then, the work is to be regarded solely as if it were an unfortunate love which fatally presages more of the same, assuming that the life to come will resemble the work, and that the poet will have almost no further need to write, because for most of the time he will be able to find the shape of future events anticipated in what he has already written. Thus my love for Albertine, to the extent that it is different from it, would already be inscribed in my love for Gilberte, in the middle of which happy time I had first heard Albertine’s name spoken, and her character described, by her aunt, without my having the slightest idea that this insignificant seed would grow, expand and one day spread its branches over the whole of my life.

  But from another point of view, the work is a sign of happiness, because it shows us that in every love the general is to be found alongside the particular, and shows us how to pass from the latter to the former by means of exercises which fortify us against unhappiness by detaching our attention from its cause in order to focus on its essential qualities. Indeed, as I was shortly to discover for myself, even while you are in love and suffering, if you have finally achieved your vocation, then during the hours you are working you feel very strongly that the being whom you love is dissolving into a greater reality, and you start intermittently to forget her and, while you are working, suffer no more from love than from any purely physical illness that has nothing to do with the loved being, such as some sort of heart ailment. It is true, though, that this is a matter of timing and that the effect seems to be the opposite if the work comes more slowly. Because there are some individuals who, having managed, in spite of us, by their unkindness or their insignificance to destroy our illusions, have themselves been reduced to nothing and severed from the chimera of love we had conjured up in our minds; and if we then set to work, our mind raises them up again, identifies them, for the purposes of our self-analysis, with individuals who have loved us, and in such cases literature, reconstructing the demolished work of amorous illusion, gives a sort of afterlife to feelings which were no longer in existence.

  It is true, then, that we are obliged to relive our private suffering with all the courage of a doctor who continues to give himself a dangerous course of injections. At the same time, though, we have to think about it in its general form, which enables us to some extent to escape its grasp, makes everybody sharers in our pain, and may even offer a kind of joy. Where life walls us in, the intellect cuts a way out, for although there may be no cure for love that is not reciprocated, the investigation of one’s suffering does provide a way out, even if only by revealing its likely consequences. The intelligence does not recognize closed situations in life, with no way out.

  So I had to resign myself, since nothing can last unless it is generalized, nor without the mind dying to itself, to the idea that even those who were dearest to the writer had done nothing in the end except pose for him like models for a painter.

  In love, a favored rival, in other words our enemy, is our benefactor. To a being who was arousing in us nothing but an insignificant physical desire he immediately adds immense value, quite unrelated, but which we confuse with her. If we had no rivals, pleasure would not be transformed into love. If we did not have any, or even if we thought we did not have any. Because there is no need for them actually to exist. The illusory life which our suspicion, our jealousy, gives to non-existent rivals is enough for our needs.

  Sometimes, when a painful section is still in rough draft, a new attachment, and new suffering, come along which enable us to finish it, to give it substance. One cannot really complain too much about these great but useful sorrows, because there is no shortage of them and they do not make us wait long for them. Nonetheless we have to hurry if we are to profit from them, for they do not last very long: one finds consolation, or else, if they are too overwhelming, and if one’s heart is no longer very sound, one dies. Because happiness alone is good for the body; whereas sorrow develops the strength of the mind. Moreover, even if it did not reveal a law to us each time this happened, it would be no less indispensable for returning us each time to the truth, forcing us to take things seriously, and uprooting each time the weeds of habit, skepticism, levity and indifference. Admittedly this truth, which is not compatible with happiness, or with health, is not always compatible with life either. Sorrow kills in the end. At each new, unbearable affliction, we feel yet another vein stand out, extending its deadly sinuosity across our temples, or under our eyes. And it is in this way that are gradually formed those terrible, ravaged faces of the old Rembrandt, and the old Beethoven, whom everybody used to laugh at. The bags under the eyes and the wrinkled forehead would not matter, of course, if there were not also suffering of the heart. But since forces can change into other forces, since accumulated heat becomes light and since the electricity in lightning can power a camera, since the dull pain in our heart can raise above itself, like a flag, the permanently visible image of each new sorrow, let us accept the physical damage it does to us in return for the spiritual knowledge it brings us; let us leave our body to disintegrate, since each new particle that breaks away from it comes back, now luminous and legible, to add itself to our work, to complete it at the price of the sufferings of which others more gifted have no need, to increase its solidity as our emotions are eroding our life. Ideas are substitutes for sorrows; the moment they change into ideas they lose a part of their power to hurt our hearts and, for a brief moment, the transformation even releases some joy. Substitutes only in the order of time, though, because it seems that the primary element is actually the idea, and the sorrow merely the mode in which certain ideas first enter our minds. But there are numerous families within the general group of ideas, some of which are joys from the start.

  These reflections allowed me to give a firmer and more precise meaning to the truth that I had always felt, particularly when Mme de Cambremer used to wonder how I could abandon a man as remarkable as Elstir for Albertine. Even from an intellectual point of view I sensed that she was wrong, but I did not know what it was that she did not understand: which was the kind of lessons through which one serves one’s apprenticeship as a man of letters. The objective value of the arts is hardly relevant to that; what we have to draw out, to bring to light, are our feelings, our passions, in other words the passions and the feelings of everyone. A woman whom we need, and who makes us suffer, arouses in us a series of feelings far more profound and far more intense than does an unusually gifted man who interests us. It remains to be seen, depending on the sphere in which we live, to what extent we regard some betrayal by which a woman has made us suffer as insignificant in relation to the truths which the betrayal has revealed to us and which the woman, happy to have made us suffer, would scarcely have been able to understand. But, whatever else, there will be no shortage of betrayals. A writer may start work on a lengthy task without any anxiety about that. Let his intelligence begin the work, plenty of sorrows will arise along the way and look after the business of finishing it. As for happiness, almost its only useful quality is to make unhappiness possible. We need, during periods of happiness, to form particularly pleasant and powerful bonds of trust and affection in order that their destruction can cause us the precious laceration called unhappiness. If one had not been happy, even if only in expectation, unhappinesses would be devoid of cruelty and consequently fruitless.

  And more than the painter, the writer, in order to obtain depth and substance, generality, literary reality, just as he needs to have seen a number of churches in order to depict a single one, also needs a number of individuals for one single feeling. For if art is long and life short, one may also say that, while inspiration is short, the feelings it has to depict are not much longer. It is our passions which provide the outline of our books, the intervening periods of respite which write them. When inspiration returns, when we can take up work again, the woman who was sitting for us to illustrate some feeling has already lost the ability to make us experience it. To continue to depict her we have to use another model, and while this may be a betrayal of the individual, from the literary point of view, thanks to the similarity of our feelings, which means that a work is both the recollection of our past loves and the prophecy of our new ones, there is no real disadvantage to these substitutions. This is one reason why studies where people try to work out who an author is talking about are pointless. Because any work, even if it is directly confessional, is at the very least intercalated between a number of episodes in the author’s life, the earlier ones which inspired it and the later ones which are no less characteristic, the details of subsequent love affairs being traced from the ones which came before. Because we are not so faithful even to the person we have loved the most as we are to ourselves, and sooner or later we forget her in order to be able—since this is one of our own traits—to start loving again. At most, this woman whom we have loved so much has given a particular form to our love, which will make us faithful to her even in infidelity. With the next woman we shall need the same morning walks, need to see her home in the same way in the evening, or to give her a hundred times too much money. (It is a curious thing, this circulation of the money we give to women, who because of that make us unhappy, that is, enable us to write books—one can almost say that books, as in artesian wells, rise to a height that is proportionate to the depth to which suffering has bored down into the heart.) These substitutions add something disinterested, something more general, to the work, something which at the same time is an austere lesson that it is not to individuals that we must attach ourselves, that it is not individuals who really exist and are consequently capable of being expressed, but ideas. So one has to hurry and lose none of the time during which one has the models at one’s disposal; for those who pose for happiness do not generally have many sittings to offer, nor alas, as it too passes so quickly, do those who pose for grief.

  All the same, even when that does not, by uncovering it, provide us with the raw material of our work, it is useful to us as a spur to doing it. Imagination and thinking can be admirable mechanisms in themselves, but they can also be inert. Suffering sets them in motion. And the individuals who pose to us for grief give us such frequent sittings, in the studio we go into only during those periods and which is within ourselves! Those periods are like an image of our life, with all its different griefs. For they in turn contain more griefs, and just when you think they have been quieted, a new one arises. New in every sense of the word: perhaps because these unpredictable situations force us to come into closer contact with ourselves, and the painful dilemmas with which love is constantly presenting us instruct us and show us, little by little, what we are made of. So when Françoise, seeing Albertine having the run of my place like a dog, spreading chaos everywhere, ruining me, causing me so much pain, told me (for at that point I had already done a few articles and some translations): “Ah, if only Monsieur, instead of this girl who makes him waste all his time, had taken on a nicely brought-up young secretary who would have sorted out all Monsieur’s manuscribbles!” I was perhaps wrong to think she was speaking wisely. By making me waste my time, by causing me pain, Albertine might perhaps have been more useful, even from the literary standpoint, than a secretary who could have organized my “manuscribbles.” But all the same, when a living creature is so badly constituted (and perhaps it is natural for man to be that creature) that he cannot love without suffering, and that he needs to suffer in order to learn truths, the life of such a creature must in the end be very tedious. Years of happiness are years wasted, waiting for a bout of suffering to make one work. The idea of this preliminary suffering then comes to be associated with the idea of work, and one is afraid of each new work because one thinks of the pain one will first have to endure in order to imagine it. And when one realizes that suffering is the best thing one can encounter in life, one thinks without terror, almost as of a release, about death.

  Yet although I rather recoiled from this, I was still very much aware that writers have frequently not treated life as a game, and exploited individuals in order to use them for books, but quite the opposite. I did not, alas, have the nobility of young Werther.[87] Without for a moment believing in Albertine’s love, I had twenty times wanted to kill myself for her, I had ruined myself, I had destroyed my health for her. Where writing is concerned, one is scrupulous, one examines things very closely, one rejects everything that is not the truth. But when it is only a matter of living, one ruins oneself, makes oneself ill, kills oneself, for lies. The vein that these lies come from may, it is true, still (if one has passed the age of being a poet) yield a small quantity of truth. Sorrows are obscure, detested servants, against whom one struggles, under whose influence one increasingly falls, unbearable, irreplaceable servants who lead us by devious ways to truth and to death. Fortunate are those who met the former before the latter, and for whom, however close together the two may be, the hour of truth struck before the hour of death.

  I also understood that the most insignificant episodes from my past life had contributed toward giving me the lesson in idealism from which I was going to benefit today. Had not my encounters with M. de Charlus, for example, even before his pro-German attitudes taught me the same lesson, done more even than my love for Mme de Guermantes or for Albertine, or than Saint-Loup’s love for Rachel, to convince me how utterly neutral matter itself is, and how thought can give it any characteristics it wants; a truth which is more profoundly emphasized by the widely misunderstood and pointlessly censured phenomenon of sexual inversion even than by that, which has already proved so instructive, of love? This latter may show us beauty deserting the woman we no longer love and taking up residence in a face which other people would find extremely ugly, and which once we might have disliked ourselves, as one day we shall again; but it is even more striking to see it, capturing the complete devotion of a great nobleman who instantly abandons a beautiful princess, migrate to a position beneath the cap of a bus conductor. And was not my astonishment each new time that I had seen, on the Champs-Élysées, in the street, or on the beach, the face of Gilberte, of Mme de Guermantes, or of Albertine, proof of the extent to which a memory persists only in a direction which diverges from the impression with which it originally coincided but from which it becomes increasingly remote?

  A writer must not take offense when inverts give his heroines masculine faces. This mildly deviant behavior is the only means by which the invert can proceed to give full general significance to what he is reading. For Racine to be able to give her full universal value to the Phaedra of antiquity, he had first for a moment to turn her into a Jansenist; similarly, if M. de Charlus had not given to the “faithless one” over whom de Musset weeps in La Nuit d’octobre or in Le Souvenir the face of Morel, he would not have wept, nor understood, since it was by that narrow and circuitous way alone that he gained access to the truths of love. It is only out of a habit derived from the insincere language of prefaces and dedications that writers talk about “my reader.” In reality each reader, when he is reading, is uniquely reading himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument which he offers the reader to enable him to discern what without this book he might not perhaps have seen in himself. The recognition within himself, by the reader, of what the book is saying, is the proof of its truthfulness, and vice versa, at least to a certain extent, it often being possible to impute the difference between the two texts not to the author but to the reader. In addition to this, the book may be too learned, too obscure, for the unsophisticated reader, and thus present him with a blurred lens, with which he will not be able to read. But other characteristics (such as inversion) may mean that the reader needs to read in a particular way in order to read properly; the author should not take offense at this, but instead should allow the reader the greatest possible freedom by saying to him: “Look for yourself, try whether you see better with this lens, or that one, or the other one.”

 

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