My Year With Proust - Day 146

"Was it because I had caught but a momentary glimpse of her that I had found her so attractive?  It may have been.  In the first place, the impossibility of stopping when we meet a woman, the risk of not meeting her again another day, give her at once the same charm as a place derives from the illness or poverty that prevents us from visiting it, or the lustreless days which remain to use to live from the battle in which we shall doubtless fall.  So that, if there were no such thing as habit, life must appear delightful to those of us who are continually under the threat of death - that is to say, to all mankind.  Then, if our imagination is set going by the desire for what we cannot possess, its flight is not limited by a reality perceived in these casual encounters in which the charms of the passing stranger are generally in direct ratio to the swiftness of our passage.  If night is falling and the carriage is moving fast, whether in town or country, there is not a single torso, disfigured like an antique marble by the speed that tears us away and the dusk that blurs it, that does not aim at our heart, from every crossing, from the lighted interior of every shop, the arrows of Beauty, that Beauty of which we are sometimes tempted to ask ourselves whether it is, in this world, anything more than the complimentary part that is added to a fragmentary or fugitive stranger by our imagination, over-stimulated by regret."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 766

We're picking up where we left off last time, with Proust reflecting on a woman he saw as his carriage sped through town. Proust suggests, "Then, if our imagination is set going by the desire for what we cannot possess, its flight is not limited by a reality perceived in these casual encounters in which the charms of the passing stranger are generally in direct ratio to the swiftness of our passage."   It is an old chestnut to say that we always want what we can't have, although I guess the question is why.  In regard to sex there is always the thrill of new bodies, positions and responses, but that can also be more than balanced out by nerves and clumsiness and working around new (and hardly improved) emotional baggage.  Rather, I think the answer is more purely emotional and expresses the very basic human desire of hope.  We desperately want our life to be more exciting or more meaningful, essentially, more beautiful.  Consequently, our desire for a new woman (or experience) is "in direct ratio to the swiftness of our passage."  The faster we speed by, and the less time we spend in actual contact, allows us to fill up the remainder with dreams.