Annie

Annie appears not as a character with an independently narrated biography, but as the central example in an examination of love, memory, and absence. Through the contrast between her perceived presence and her imagined return, the discussion argues that a person represented in imagination cannot sustain the same feeling as a living, unpredictable person: absence alters both the object of love and the love directed toward it.

Annie as an Example

The account introduces Annie through the speaker’s love for her, which can awaken before an image of her appears. In this sequence, an unspecified thought stirs love; that feeling, joined to knowledge, passes through an imaging stage and gives rise to Annie’s Irreal object-face. The image is the theme and organizing pole of an affective development already under way. It does not independently cause the love. This order matters: the imagined Annie is formed within a movement of feeling, rather than encountered as a present person capable of initiating an entirely new response.

A second example turns on a graceful gesture Annie made the previous day. At the time, the real gesture moved the speaker to tenderness. Later, that gesture and its tenderness can both be recalled, still marked as belonging to the past. Or the gesture can instead be reproduced deliberately to bring tenderness back into the present. In that case, the aim is not simply to recover the old gesture or yesterday’s feeling as historical objects. The speaker seeks to feel tenderness now, using the remembered gesture to prompt it. Annie’s gesture thus makes visible a change in the direction of affect: what had once arisen in response to her action is now deliberately sought through its image.

The Difference Between Presence and Absence

When Annie is absent, the speaker’s knowledge and outward conduct toward her may continue. The speaker still knows her qualities, expresses confidence by writing to her about everything that happens, and would defend her interests as if she were present. Absence also brings distress, melancholy, or even despair. Yet the account distinguishes these responses from the positive impulses of love: such suffering arises chiefly from the real emptiness Annie’s absence leaves in everyday life, not from an imagined Annie acting upon the speaker.

Love itself changes because a present Annie could continually surprise the speaker and require fresh adjustment. The feeling was subordinated to its real object and lived, in the account’s formulation, the life of Annie. An imagined Annie, by contrast, is limited to what the speaker knows of her. The relationship between feeling and object is reversed: instead of the person continually informing and renewing love, the feeling produces its imagined object, which becomes its strict correlate. The result is a feeling that cannot exceed what the speaker already knows and that lacks the inexhaustible possibilities associated with Annie as an individual reality.

This change does not mean that the absent speaker’s love is simply insincere. Rather, the feeling loses the casualness, docility, and richness that a real object could give it. It becomes something the speaker actively tries to revive, almost as if playing or miming it, and may gradually harden into schematic, familiar forms. Annie’s imagined image can become banal alongside it. The account therefore treats the impoverishment as a change in the structure of love, not merely as a false claim to feel what is no longer felt.

Letters, Memory, and the Limits of the Image

The material presence of letters offers a counterpoint to the weakening imagined image. The account describes impatience for letters not principally as a desire for news, where there is no particular reason for fear or hope, but as a response to their concrete reality: the stationery, black signs, and smell. These features help replace the weakening affective medium of the image and direct the speaker toward a more real Annie. Correspondence sustains knowledge and conduct across absence, while its physical particulars also answer, however imperfectly, to the loss of her presence.

The contrast also clarifies why remembered tenderness cannot simply reproduce the original feeling. When Annie’s real gesture first provoked tenderness, that response emerged in time, as the gesture unfolded. When the gesture is later imagined, its power to provoke tenderness appears alongside it as an already known quality. The feeling is anticipated as an end, and the image is produced in order to elicit it. What seems to be the same gesture therefore belongs to a different affective situation: one was encountered as a living event; the other is selected for its known capacity to prompt a desired response.

Return and Significance

The account imagines Annie’s return as a rupture in this formal construction. After a period of readjustment, the degraded feeling would be replaced by a real one. The speaker might briefly miss the kindness and simplicity of Annie as imagined, but that response would reflect a loss of memory of the affective impoverishment that accompanied the image, not proof that the imagined relationship had been richer.

Annie’s significance lies in how the examples make the difference between imagined and perceived presence concrete. Imaginary feelings are not dismissed as unreal feelings; they are feelings that arise in relation to Irreal objects and depend on those objects’ absence. Annie’s remembered gesture can summon tenderness, and her absence can shape sustained conduct, but neither can make the imagined figure equivalent to the person who once surprised and moved the speaker. Her return marks the limit of the image: the real does not merely add new information to an unchanged love, but exposes how much that love had been altered in her absence.