He suffered greatly from being shut up among all these people whose stupidity and absurdities wounded him all the more cruelly since, being ignorant of his love, incapable, had they known of it, of taking any interest, or of doing more than smile at it as at some childish joke, or deplore it as an act of insanity, they made it appear to him in the aspect of a subjective state which existed for himself alone, whose reality there was nothing external to confirm; he suffered overwhelmingly, to the point at which even the sound of the instruments made him want to cry, from having to prolong his exile in this place to which Odette would never come, in which no one, nothing was aware of her existence, from which she was entirely absent. Marcel Proust
About This Quote

In this quote from "Master And Margarita", the Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov says that the narrator suffers greatly from being shut up among all these people that “whose stupidity and absurdities wounded him all the more cruelly since, being ignorant of his love, incapable, had they known of it, of taking any interest, or of doing more than smile at it as at some childish joke, or deplore it as an act of insanity, they made it appear to him in the aspect of a subjective state which existed for himself alone.” In other words, not only is he suffering from the fact that no one knows his feelings for Odette but also from the fact that those around him assume that this is a mere manifestation of his insanity. The reader will understand that if they have been moved by even a part of what he is saying then they cannot help but empathize with him.

Source: Swann's Way

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