We (when I say “We” I mean not we as a class, but rather the people I associate myself with who insist that one has to persuade their way into a relationship with something in order to be close to someone, and dissect them in an intimate setting), have this idea of love being something that comes later. A sensation that comes after the fact, a practical skill, something we have need experience to achieve. I can’t count how many times I’ve been asked by a friend, “Do you believe in love at first sight?”

For Proust that isn’t a question. Look at Marcel and Albertine – love is something that unfolds in us when we come in contact with our perception of beauty. Love is not something we chose, it’s something which a person’s eyes or smile or hair possesses that resonates with us.

For instance, when Marcel is constantly running into these girls that have a power over his sensuality, these girls who were individuals and not aesthetically similar to one another yet were an entity to Marcel, he talks about love for them as if there’s no choice but to be glassy eyed and heartfelt. “I was in love with none of them, loving them all, and yet the possibility of meeting them was in my daily life the sole elements of delight, alone made to burgeon in me those high hopes by which every obstacle is surmounted, hopes ending often in fury if I had not seen them.”* An infatuation or obsession is rooted in prior knowledge or interaction with a party – Marcel is in love. He loves the carelessness of their girlhood (even though he constantly objects to it), in love with his position being an outsider looking into the fish tank.

Marcel, throughout the text, has been presenting love as an invincible force, something which one immediately succumbs to. Love is the missing piece, always. He doesn’t lust after the bodies underneath the clothes so much as he yearns for the validation of the force within him telling him that interaction with these girls is what he needs.

And yet he presents love as temporary, something that can come and go with desire. “Variance of a belief, annulment also of love, which, pre-existent and mobile comes to rest at the image of any woman simply because that will be almost impossible to attainment,”* He’s talking about love as if there’s a well of it within a human’s emotional bank. Or rather that there is a tidal wave of  it that comes and goes with the moon of lust, desire, and beauty. Of course the element of unattainability makes love all the more exciting, not having what you desire and not knowing whether it will really be yours or not gives the imagination a job. Proust proposes that love is something that is permanent but only because it’s dormant within us. The actual feeling of being “in love” with someone is temporary and has little to do with you but more to do with the qualities someone possesses.

The Proustian definition of love is volatile and riddled with toxicity and trouble but most of all passion which can be devoted to a simple feature or an aura. The popular, modern idea of love loses the passion and ferocity and is instead about patience and habit. It’s about learning personality traits in their entirety and in an accurate way – Proust’s idea of love has nothing to do with habit and definitely not accuracy. Love, like many things in the novel, is about imagination, the feelings that the imagination conjures, and the mental and physical disruption love creates.

* The version of Within a Budding Grove didn’t have page numbers for me to reference, sorry.