“All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.”
–Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
Last night, I decided to go to law school. This morning, I resolved to pursue a career in diplomacy. And all of this afternoon, I have been agonizing over whether I should eventually settle down in Paris or New York.
While I have been fastidiously planning out the rest of my life, I have been battling inconvenient mood swings and overly dramatic emotions that threaten to derail my carefully cultivated focus on the future. I fight to quiet daydreams that spring naturally from people-watching the crowds streaming past café windows, because I really should be finishing an assignment. After a run, I don’t allow myself to linger by the river and watch until the last traces of sunset fade away, because I really should be preparing for bed. And, as I finally lie down far later than I had intended to, I try not to wallow in the miseries of a bedroom that makes up for its lack of cool air with an abundance of outside noise, because I really should be getting some rest.
It is much easier to resist the pull of idle contemplation, rapturous enjoyment, and all-consuming wretchedness when the Boston winter is equally numbing to your fingers and your senses. But in the summer, the slow pace and steady warmth of the world outside calls for meandering and melodramatic thinking. It seems most natural to languish in a lit patch of grass and let thoughts travel with clouds, sometimes in a gentle stream and sometimes in a desperate, wind-whipped escape. It is the time in which I can best relate to the tortuously slow growing pains of Marcel Proust’s unnamed narrator of Remembrance of Things Past.
Proust’s narrator can be frustratingly petty, self-pitying, and sensitive. Especially in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, in which he is sixteen and confused and in love with every girl around him, he is especially hard to bear. But, as my own summers become more about working and planning and worrying and less about thinking and sulking and wondering at beautiful things, Proust’s earnest exploration of adolescent angst becomes a reminder of what I am missing.
Proust’s narrator is sixteen and I am twenty, and I would like to think that I have moved past much of the childish selfishness that makes him so indolent and insufferable to read about. But I have not moved past the constant confusion and contemplation and the occasional off-putting candidness that redeems him. I fall in love with a lot of ill-advised sights and ideas and feelings in a state of mind that cannot last. In the winter, these ideas freeze over with some semblance of permanence. But in the summer, it’s easier to let them melt away.
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