Reading Proust (in translation). In this sentence, Proust is talking about Robert and his mistress who, after the relationship had ended, would still spend nights by his side:
He felt that his shoulders, his limbs, all of him, were for her, even when he was duly restless from insomnia or thinking of the things he had to do, so entirely usual that they could not disturb her.
Thus: how the contours, feel, smells of one’s own body can be for the Other something reassuring and emotionally confirming in a way we never experience ourselves. Our body is for them a kind of receptacle into which their emotions snugly fit, as if those emotions only know themselves in contact with our body, even though our body, in that particular form, is not something that we can experience directly at all, since we are on its ‘inside’. And so the lover reflects back to us a part of ourselves otherwise inaccessible.
Also, the above extract prompted the thought of how, subjectively and on a day to day basis, we experience quite significant, unpredictable shifts and variations in ourselves. The ‘I’ seems re-situated from one week to the next, unable to re-enter the mood or self-understanding it so easily occupied the previous day. And yet, on the other hand, our body as seen and experienced by the lover is reassuringly constant, stable and, indeed, a counterpoint to their own subjective instability. We receive from their eyes the constant image of our own self
Whether we are lying in bed asleep, in the kitchen with insomnia, thinking obscure thoughts, silently unhappy, the lover finds in our familiar folds and contours identity, stability, continuity. In looking at us they renew contact with something habitual and reliable in themselves. And, of course, the reverse is true. When we look at them we slot back in to a certain recognisable part of ourselves.
If this is true, then our identity resides ‘outside ourselves’ , with others and the image of ourselves they reflect back to us, so that we discover and are only able to fully name ourselves through them, when we see the spectral ‘I’, the constant ghost, visible only in their eyes, possessed by them, owned, almost, by them, so that when they leave us forever or die, it really is like a piece of us has gone, and not just an accidental piece either, but the every ‘I’ which threaded us together.