| Alone |
|
by
W. H. Auden |
|
| Each lover has a theory of his own | |
| About the difference between the ache | |
| Of being with his love, and being alone: | |
| Why what, when dreaming, is dear flesh and bone | |
| That really stirs the senses, when awake, | 5 |
| Appears a simulacrum of his own. | |
| Narcissus disbelieves in the unknown: | |
| He cannot join his image in the lake | |
| So long as he assumes he is alone. | |
| The child, the waterfall, the fire, the stone, | 10 |
| Are always up to mischief, though, and take | |
| The universe for granted as their own. | |
| The elderly, like Proust, are always prone | |
| To think of love as a subjective fake; | |
| The more they love, the more they feel alone. | 15 |
| Whatever view we hold, it must be shown | |
| Why every lover has a wish to make | |
| Some other kind of otherness his own: | |
| Perhaps, in fact, we never are alone. | |
| Proust
— Marcel Proust (1871-1922), French author of the seven-volume,
roughly three-thousand page novel À la Recherche du
Temps Perdu (the title was originally translated as A Remembrance
of Things Past but is now more often and more accurately rendered
as In Search of Lost Time), one of the great achievements of
20th century literature. The novel begins with the narrator encountering
a madeleine (a kind of plain cookie); its scent reminds him of his childhood,
and the rest of the novel is his memory of all the people, places, and
culture of his youth. The novel has forty major characters and approximately
two-thousand minor chracters. It is on the short list of serious
nominees for the title of the greatest novel ever written. Like
Auden, Proust was homosexual, and many of the female characters in the
novel can easily be read as male characters, especially because so many
French female names are simply male names with an extra e added
to the end (e.g. André for a man becomes Andrée
for a woman). |
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