PROUST AND THE DOUBLE "I"
1023
being as harmoniously ordered by a general idea from which they de–
pended but which he did not know, so that it added nothing to his
own good qualities, to that personal value, intellectual and moral, to
which he attached so high a price.
This "keen delight" corresponds perfectly, on the intellectual
level, with the pleasure which he derived, on the emotional level, from
the steeples of Martinville or the trees of Carqueville. It is another
instance of "revelation." For this "work of art" which his friend
becomes and which is the only form under which he really affects
him ("I did not feel when I was with him and talked to him-and
no doubt it would have been the same with everyone else-any of
that happiness which was, on the other hand, possible for me to
experience when I was by myself") is Proust's own discovery anq
his own form of expression. And the same "peculiar qualities," which
Proust can fathom in Saint-Loup because they are
his
own creation,
leave Marcel Proust indifferent when he finds them in his own
friends because, although they emphasize, they throw no light on the
impenetrable mystery which one being constitutes for another. Thus,
the models supplied by the acquaintances of Marcel Proust lend
him only the least part of themselves, only the visible edge of their
being, something like the crest of a submarine reef unexplored,
unexplorable, in whose stead Proust, as creative as nature, fashions
a new one.
Hence, when Marcel pretends to remember, he does not manufac–
ture his past by merely transposing that of Marcel Proust. For Marcel
does not recall the feelings, for instance, which were once aroused in
Marcel Proust by the young men he cherished, any more than M.arcel
Proust recalls the young girls no longer in bloom. Nobody remembers
anything. But as for Proust, he knows how he suffers, and how he
cannot help suffering. And it is a certain potential of suffering, in–
variable and equal to itself, that survives death and continues, no
matter what the nature of the object that induces the suffering may
be, even if it is imaginary. His memory tells him, it is true, that he
has already suffered in the same way; but it does not supply him with
any witness to help him reconstruct the pattern of his misery; for all
the witnesses, whether internal or external, are dead.
Yet there is no need to reconstruct it when one can start anew
