Proust’s Law (are you listening?) is twofold:
(a) What least thing our self-love longs for most
Others instinctively withhold;
(b) Only when time has slain desire
Is his wish granted to a smiling ghost
Neither harmed nor warmed, now, by the fire.

Merrill frames a wry “law” of human relations under Proust’s name: what the ego most craves—recognition, affection, reassurance—is precisely what others, sensing the neediness or pressure behind it, tend to deny. The second clause sharpens the irony: fulfillment arrives only after desire has died, when the self is no longer invested in the outcome. The “smiling ghost” suggests belated gratification that is emotionally unusable—safe from hurt, but also incapable of warmth. The poem thus links self-love and social withholding to time’s power to neutralize longing, turning wished-for intimacy into a posthumous, aestheticized consolation rather than lived satisfaction.