How many times during a terrible fight with a partner have you promised yourself: “This time I’m going to stay angry; I’m not going to forgive her!” (or him). Something about anger seems more real than the gentler, happier emotions: anger feels authentic, while affection sometimes feels partially made up. But maybe that’s only because it’s easy to be angry, and being loving over a prolonged spell almost always takes a little work.
There’s a point in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time when Marcel has decided that Albertine is nothing but a source of misery to him. He spends long hours – and longer sentences – contemplating ways of getting rid of her, and the many ways he would be happier without her. He knows without any doubt, as well as he knows himself, that he despises Albertine. But then his servant tells him that Albertine is gone. And instantly, and for many miserable months to come, everything in Marcel’s world is reversed. He is desperate to win Albertine back; he is heartbroken; he cannot bear the thought of life without her. Imagining her with another man or woman is worse than the idea of putting a bullet in his head.
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