The Amorous Rage Of An Infuriated Animal

There have been moments during this project that made me at once feel a sense of solidarity with Proust, and then a sense of shame for myself; my character, I have found, is not what I often tell myself it is. Throughout my life, I have tried to uphold a sort of "minimum standard" that I set, which, according to some people close to me, is excessively high. This goes for how I treat others versus my expectation for how I am going to be  treated, my work ethic, and what I expect of myself artistically and intellectually.

Tonight, I found a quote that immediately jumped off the page. These novels are, partly, a treatise on the human mechanics of loving and being loved. They detail one man's experiences and insights on a topic that interconnects us all. His insights, in some cases, have struck extraordinarily close to home. This brings me back to my opening sentence, and to this quote, which was spoken by the narrator in regards to his desire of a beautiful woman, contrasted to his feelings when he suspects his lover, Albertine, desires a woman herself:

"We consider it innocent to desire, and heinous that the other person should do so." (Proust, 168)

I will admit that in the scope of offerings Proust made to me today and yesterday, this was not the pinnacle of his investigations or his findings. This was not the most profound passage I found. Far from either, it was a passing remark made about a topic that he has been addressing over the span of two separate novels. However, it was impossible to ignore, for me, the parallelism to my own life, and specifically, to the singular relationship that these books have given me so much perspective on. Equally, it has turned around that first sentence of this post in such a way that this post ties into my previous in regards to misassigned guilt. 

There is a feeling, and I will say that this is a universal one, of desire that no human can entirely dismiss on random days, for random people that we will never even know the name of passing in the street. This desire may be totally misguided; a non-existent version of a passerby seen from the corner of our eye evincing something that could never be true and would never cause us to think twice, for example. Regardless, it exists, and we know it to be entirely harmless. To have that fleeting feeling of attraction is a natural human function and, without it, we would likely miss the details of a beautiful person, which would make the world a much less colorful place. There is a difference, again, universal, between a passing, second-long attraction to a stranger we see once, and carrying out behaviors based on some longer term attraction. The latter, of course, being typically understood as immoral in our society (this is a sentiment with which I agree).

As a monogamous person, one who has spent the bulk of his young adult life in monogamous involvements, I know that I do not ascribe importance to this moments in my life. I know they are as a breeze and thus, of no real matter. I am guilty, however, as many of us likely are, of putting a weight upon this same reality when it exists in the mind and eyes of the one I love or ones I have loved. It has often been, in my mind, hard to bear when a significant other has found another person attractive, even in passing. Perhaps this speaks volumes about my character (it does) much like it does for Proust as he represents himself in his narrator. Both of us have self-doubt to conquer that makes any person a possible threat to our happiness. 

Having this spelled out for me, however, and thinking to myself how crooked it is of Proust to think such a thing only to realize that I have many times felt the same way without verbally expressing it, has turned my mind. It was at the moment I read that passage that it became apparent to me that on the sliding scale of consciousness, we are all in a very similar place. We all experience similar emotional triggers and responses, with similar sets of stimuli and in similar settings. I am not so different from the people I have struggled to understand throughout much of my life, and they are not so different from me. 

We are all equally at fault and equally innocent in matters of the heart in a grander scheme by the end of our time. To assume I have been more wronged than I have wronged others is, I see now, incredibly strange.

To bring this home, I offer a quote that may summarize my thoughts more clearly. Thank you, Jannell, for posting this tonight, at exactly the moment I was writing about this exact topic:

"‎Here’s one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of. Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real — you get the idea. But please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called “virtues.” This is not a matter of virtue — it’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

People who can adjust their natural default-setting this way are often described as being “well adjusted,” which I suggest to you is not an accidental term." -David Foster Wallace