Вторник

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,
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,
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.

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.

Auden

Narcissus — In Greek mythology, a beautiful youth who perished when he saw his reflection in the water and, overcome by fascination at his own beauty, could not take his eyes from it.

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).

(17/10/2006)