Translations:CP 03024/8/en

For the death of Albertine to be able to eliminate my suffering, the shock would have had to have killed her not only outside of myself, as it had done, but within me. There, she had never been more alive. In order to enter into us, another person must take on the form, bend themselves to the framework of Time; appearing to us only in successive moments, never being able to reveal to us more than one aspect of themselves at a time, or present us with more than a single photograph of themselves. A great weakness no doubt for a person to consist only of a collection of moments; a great strength also: they are a product of memory, and our memory of a certain moment is not informed of everything that has happened since; this moment which it has recorded still endures, and along with it lives the person whose form is outlined there. A disintegration moreover which not only bring the dead back to life but multiplies them. When I had reached the point of being able to bear the grief of losing one of those Albertines, it all began again with another, with a hundred others. So that what until then had constituted the sweetness of my life, the perpetual rebirth of moments from the past, became its torment. (Different times, seasons). I wait until summer is over, then autumn. But the first frosts recall other memories so cruel that then, like an invalid (who sees things from the point of view of his body, his chest and his cough, but in my case mentally) I felt that what I had still to dread most for my grief, for my heart, was the return of winter. Associated as it was to all of the seasons, in order for me to lose the memory of Albertine I should have had to forget them all, only to learn them all over again like a stroke victim learning to read again. Only the actual death of my own self would have consoled me for hers. But one’s own death is nothing so extraordinary, it is consummated every day in spite of ourselves.