from Essays After Montaigne
A gentleman of ours exceedingly subject to the gout, being instantly solicited by his Physitions, to leave all manner of salt-meats, was wont to answer pleasantly, that when the fits or pangs of the disease tooke him, hee would have some body to quarell with; and that crying and cursing, now against Bolonie-sausage, and sometimes by railing against salt neats-tongues, and gammons of bakon, he found some ease.
Plutarch saith fitly of those affectionate themselves to Monkies and little Dogges, that the loving part which is in us, for want of a lawful hold, rather than it will be idle, doth forge a false and frivolous hold unto itselfe.
Livius speaking of the Romane army in Spaine, after the losse of two great Captaines that were brethren. 'They all wept and often beat their heades.' It is an ordidarie custome: And the philosopher Byon was very pleasant with the king, that for griefe tore his haire, when he said, 'Doth this man thinke, that baldnesse will asswage his griefe?'
A good friend of mine knew a pair of brothers whose father, like them, was a big fan of Notre Dame football. His wife once spoke to him in the last two minutes of a game that Notre Dame lost on the last play. He decided that the loss was the result of her interruption, so he went into the kitchen, opened all of the cans of tomatoes that happened to be on the counter, and emptied them on the floor. Or to take a less feeble-minded example, my father-in-law always took the persistent shoving of a cold, stinging wind personally, which I admit it's hard not to do.
But the greatest example of the soul discharging its passions on a false object, a reflection of itself in another, is the intoxicating madness of erotic love as it is so often portrayed in literature. And the most exhaustive exploration of that misdirected love is Proust's In Search of Lost Time. There are many variations on this theme in that novel, especially Swann's love for Odette in "A Love of Swann's" and the narrator's love for Albertine starting in "Place Names: The Place" and stretching through "The Fugitive." These are loves driven not by affection, regard, or even physical attraction, but by jealousy and fear, or as Harold Bloom would have it:
Sexual jealousy, Proust suggests, is a mask for the fear of mortality: the jealous lover becomes obsessed with every detail of the space and time of betrayal because he dreads that there will not be enough space and time for himself. Like the art historian, the bereft lover is seeking the truth of a past illumination, but the researcher of jealousy finds the illumination a darkness.
Whatever the underlying motivation, it's passion discharged on a false object. Swann is not interested in Odette when he has her. Nor is the narrator interested in Albertine when she's around. But both become ardent when they suspect the object of their affection is with another. This results in hundreds of pages of suffering for all involved to no good purpose. For Swann, his affair with Odette culminates in his marrying her after this grimly humorous realization:
To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!
7:55:48 PM 
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