Cured
I no longer loved Gilberte. She was for me like a dead person for whom one has long mourned, and then forgetfulness has come, and if she were to be resuscitated would no longer fit into a life which has ceased to be fashioned for her. I no longer had any desire to see her, not even that desire to show her that I did not wish to see her which, every day, when I was in love with her, I vowed to myself that I would flaunt before her when I loved her no longer.
One would be cured for ever of romanticism if one could make up one's mind, in thinking of the woman one loves, to try to be the man one will be when one no longer loves her. Gilberte's book-cover and her agate marble must have derived their importance in the past from some purely inward state, since now they were to me a book-cover and a marble like any others.
(Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, (New York: The Modern Library Edition, 1999) Vol. IV, pp 153 and 187)
Moksheungming
moksheungming@yahoo.com
2011.12.3