Tuesday, April 5, 2016

My Year With Proust - Day 97

   "She thrust it behind her back; I put my arms round her neck, raising the plaits of hair which she wore over her shoulders, either because she was still of an age for it or because her mother chose to make her look a child for a little longer so as to make herself seem younger; and we wrestled, locked together, I tried to pull her towards me, and she resisted; her cheeks, inflamed by the effort, were as red and round as two cherries; she laughed as though I were tickling her; I held her gripped between my legs like a young tree which I was trying to climb; and, in the middle of my gymnastics, when I was already out of breath, with the muscular exercise and the heart of the game, I felt, like a few drops of sweat swung from me by the effort, my pleasure express itself in a form which I could not even pause for a moment to analyze; immediately, I snatched the letter from her.  Whereupon Gilberte said good-naturedly: 'You know, if you like, we might go on wrestling a bit longer.'
   Perhaps she was dimly conscious that my game had another object than the one I had avowed, but too dimly to have been able to see that I had attained it.  And I who was afraid that she had noticed (and a slight movement of recoil and constraint as of offended modesty which she made and checked a moment later made me think that my fear had not been unfounded) agreed to go on wrestling, lest she should suppose that I had indeed had not other object in view than the one after which I wished only to sit quietly by her side."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 532-533

I'm including this passage for a couple reasons, neither of them particularly profound.  Mainly I just think it's funny and endearing, and shows that even the greatest writers were at one time clumsy, sexually frustrated teenagers who can't think of any better approach than wrestling - and that girls/women always know more than they're letting on.

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