I’ve just finished Proust’s “The Captive.” The ending was beautiful. It’s a great study in breaking up. The narrator has been in love with Albertine for three volumes, I think, but it’s been an elusive love for him. Albertine is beautiful, ostensibly devoted to him, and susceptible to his influences in all things, yet she’s a liar. She likes women, is shocking in her exploits with them, but hides it just enough to keep the narrator mired in doubt and indecision. Although it’s clear she prefers women, it’s never clear whether she also loves the narrator in her own way or not. The narrator has known that he should end it, but he cannot. Near the end he makes a brave stand, ending it definitively and asking her to leave the house in the morning, but the pain of separation is too much for him, and he caves, reconciling with her at the last moment. No dramatic and courageous breakup. But the breach in their relationship is irrevocable, nevertheless. She does not treat him with quite the same affection afterward, and days later he decides that the time has finally come. “One has dispersed the storm, returned to a smiling serenity. The agonizing mystery of a hatred with no known cause, and perhaps no end, is dispelled. Henceforth one finds oneself once more face to face with the problem, momentarily thrust aside, of a happiness which one knows to be impossible . . . Now that life with Albertine had become possible once again, I felt that I could derive nothing from it but misery, since she did not love me; better to part from her in the gentle solace of her acquiescence, which I would prolong in memory. Yes, this was the moment. . .” But he was too late to initiate the ending. When he finally came to this decision she had already left the house with her bags, a brief note left behind.

The genesis of a breakup is dissected by Proust with his usual insightfulness. He notes how the initial break by Marcel, even though it didn’t stick, ultimately brought about the final break. “Preparations for war, which are recommended by the most misleading of adages as the best way of ensuring peace, on the contrary create first of all the belief in each of the adversaries that the other desires a rupture, a belief which brings the rupture about, and then, when it has occurred, the further belief in each of the two that it is the other that has sought it. Even if the threat was not sincere, its success encourages a repetition. But the exact point up to which a bluff may succeed is difficult to determine; if one party goes too far, the other, which has yielded hitherto, advances in its turn; the first party, no longer capable of changing its methods, accustomed to the idea that to seem not to fear a rupture is the best way of avoiding one (which is what I had done that night with Albertine), and moreover driven by pride to prefer death to surrender, perseveres in its threat until the moment when neither can draw back. The bluff may also be blended with sincerity, may alternate with it, and what was yesterday a game may become a reality tomorrow.” This strikes me as absolutely correct, and also chilling. One likes to think that breakups are moved by destiny, that they have an unassailable internal logic, but of course it’s not true. They are often driven by chance, by the whims of the moment and the unreflected, fleeting maneuvers of arguing lovers, set in motion by circumstances and random utterances.

I wonder if Marcel the narrator and Albertine might have been able to craft a more successful relationship if Albertine could have been honest about her preference for women. Much of Marcel’s ongoing pain centered around her deceptions, her secret life, and her constant lies. Yet Marcel noted many times that it’s mystery that fuels love, that once the pursuer catches the pursued, love fades. “Then beneath that rose-pink face I felt that there yawned like a gulf the inexhaustible expanse of the evenings when I had not known Albertine. I could, if I chose, take Albertine on my knee, hold her head in my hands, I could caress her, run my hands slowly over her, but, just as if I had been handling a stone which encloses the salt of immemorial oceans or the light of a star, I felt that I was touching no more than the sealed envelope of a person who inwardly reached to infinity.” Beautiful.

The scene in which Marcel announces that they must part—when he asks Albertine to be gone by the morning—is violently heart-rending. It’s difficult to read, painful. Yet it’s clear that it is best for both of them. That’s what I can’t reconcile in my mind, in this or any other breakup. It seems like emotions ought to follow some logic. How can one reel emotionally against what is correct and true? It seems cruel.

In the heat of argument Albertine blurted out something which revealed one of her several personas – “the most mysterious, most simple, most loathsome … which she made me with an air of disgust, and the exact words of which . . . I could not quite make out.” Marcel said to her that he’d gladly have given her hundreds of francs to play the fashionable lady whenever she pleased. But she didn’t want that—she wanted her freedom. What she said was, “I’d a great deal rather you left me free for once in a way to go and get myself b . . . (me faire casser). . .” Her face blushed at once, she looked appalled, and put her hand over her mouth. Marcel couldn’t figure out what she had intended to say. It finally came to him later: “le pot.” The text doesn’t translate this French word, but the note in the back of the volume translates it as slang for “anus.” What Albertine had been about to say was “me faire casser le pot,” an “obscene slang expression meaning to have anal intercourse.” It seems odd. Is this what lesbians want—anal intercourse? I had no idea. I thought just the gay boys liked le pot. Maybe Proust was just trying to be shocking, and as we all know, the anus is shocking, or at least butt fucking. Maybe, as commentators have said, much of the lesbian love in Proust’s writing was a simple inversion of his true interest—gay male sex.

Lately I’ve been writing the content for a computer-based training course. These things are always so unrewarding because you’re writing to please an entire committee of people, most of them clueless marketing types who … well, haven’t a clue. No matter what you write, there will always be at least someone who has major complaints, seldom well founded, and usually idiotic. From one person I got this comment, quoted verbatim: “Hmmmm I don’t like this sentence and I can’t tell you why. It kind of gives me a negative. But I like this next sentence.” How can I work with this?