A world that demands high degrees of self-control, cynicism, and rationality – and is marked by extreme insecurity and competitiveness – justly sees in childhood its own counterbalancing virtues, qualities that have too sternly and definitively had to be surrendered in return for the keys to the adult realm.
His accent is kind of irresistible, she says. It makes him feel a little lonely to realise how easy it is to be liked by someone who has no idea who he is.
Hence Proust’s assertion that the greatness of works of art has nothing to do with the apparent quality of their subject matter, and everything to do with the subsequent treatment of that matter.
Unfortunately for our esteem, societies of the West are not known for their conduciveness to the surrender of pretensions, to the acceptance of age or fat, let alone poverty and obscurity.
They hug tightly, expressing the pure affection available only to two people who have no further designs upon each other. Their lack of time is a privilege.
But reassurance can be the cruelest antidote to anxiety. Our rosy predictions both leave the anxious unprepared for the worst.
The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding, even if, as Proust warns is, ’when we discover the true lives of other people, the real world beneath the world of appearance, we get as many surprises as on visiting a house of plain exterior which is full of hidden treasures, torture-chambers or skeletons.
Our vulnerability insults our self-conception; we are in pain and at the same time offended that we could so easily be so.
The more tempting kind of beauty has only a few angles from which it may be glimpsed, and then not in all lights and at all times. It flirts dangerously with ugliness, it takes risks with itself, it does not side comfortably with mathematical rules of proportion, it draws its appeal from precisely those details that also lend themselves to ugliness. As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.
The longing for company may be no less powerful or irresponsible in its effects than the sexual motive once was.
It is one of the ironies of love that it is easiest confidently to seduce those we are least attracted to.
Deprivation quickly drives us into a process of appreciation.
There would come a moment with every book when we would feel that something was incongruous, misunderstood, or constraining, and it would give us a responsibility to leave our guide behind and continue our thoughts alone.
We are chaotic chemical propositions, in dire need of basic principles that we can adhere to during our brief rational spells.
A spouse who gets angry at having been betrayed is evading a basic, tragic truth: that no one can be everything to another person.
One has to go into relationships with equal expectations, ready to give as much as the other.
What dangers are posed by those touchingly insecure men who, unsure of their own powers of attraction, need to keep finding out whether they are acceptable to others.
Friends afford us a change to express our deepest selves, and that the conversations we have with them are a privileged forum in which to say what we really think and, by extension and with no mystical allusion, be who we really are.
If prostitutes... attract us so little, it is not because they are less beautiful than other women, but because they are ready and waiting; because they already offer us precisely what we seek to attain.
Afraid of losing her, we forget all the others. Sure of keeping her, we compare her with those others whom at once we prefer to her.