Ce que nous croyons notre amour, notre jalousie, n’est pas une même passion continue, indivisible. Ils se composent d’une infinité d’amours successifs, de jalousies différentes et qui sont éphémères, mais par leur multitude ininterrompue donnent l’impression de la continuité, l’illusion de l’unité.

From Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, Paris: Gallimard, 1999, p. 297.

Addendum (February 27, 2013)

Proust wrote this about Charles Swann’s love affair with Odette de Crécy, two early characters in his masterpiece, which boasts of a couple of thousand, but my selection of this quote is not only about my own love affairs, all of which have suffered from the illusion of unity, but also about my experience of love, love par excellence, which on occasion strikes me as uninterrupted and continuous since my early youth. The four great loves of my life, and many minor ones in between, merge into one and indivisible one that has never left me, not even for a brief moment. Proust died too young to fully grasp this reading of his ruminations about loves lost. Luckily for me, all my love affairs now merge into my last one. And last is the word. My beloved has thus turned into the woman of my life. The only woman ever. The woman. And I have loved her since the beginning of time, thus making the illusion of unity as precious as love itself. Love sans phrase.