My Year With Proust - Day 219

   "But the beginning of the afternoon's entertainment interested me in quite another way.  It made me realise in part the nature of the illusion of which Saint-Loup was a victim with regard to Rachel, and which had set a gulf between the images that he and I respectively had of his mistress, when we saw her that morning among the blossoming pear trees.  Rachel had scarcely more than a walking-on part in the little play.  but seen thus, she was another woman.  She had one of those faces to which distance - and not necessarily that between stalls and stage, the world being merely a larger theatre - gives form and outline and which, seen from close to, crumble to dust.  Standing beside her one saw only a nebula, a milk way of freckles, of tiny spots, nothing more.  At a respectable distance, all this ceased to be visible and, from cheeks that withdrew, were reabsorbed into her face, there rose like a crescent moon a nose so fine and so pure that one would have liked to be the object of Rachel's attention, to see her again and again, to keep her near one, provided that one had never seen her differently and a close range.  This was not my case, but it had been Saint-Loup's when he first saw her on the stage.  Then he had asked himself how he might approach her, how get to know her, a whole miraculous world had opened up in his imagination - the world in which she lived - from which emanated an exquisite radiance but into which he could never penetrate."

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 177-178

Here Proust continues to grapple with his friend Robert's fascination with his mistress, Rachel, the woman that Proust himself had met years before in a brothel.  He had just witnessed Rachel in a small, nondescript part in a small, nondescript play, but had also seen her play a role in organizing a group of her friends to catcall another young actress.  Proust is horrified by that act, as "the idea of deliberate unkindness being too painful for me to bear."  (And I know exactly what he means.  I never mind when people take shots at me, even if they are unintentionally or intentionally cruel, but I feel an almost physical pain when someone else is being mistreated or humiliated)  After that brief observation Proust moves on to his discussion of Rachel's physical appearance and her nature.  She had one of those faces to which distance - and not necessarily that between stalls and stage, the world being merely a larger theatre - gives form and outline and which, seen from close to, crumble to dust.  Standing beside her one saw only a nebula, a milk way of freckles, of tiny spots, nothing more."  However, when she was on the stage she was something much more than that, and not because she was a great (or even a good) actress.  Rather, she had a face that was best seen from a distance, not because she was ugly in appearance but because it somehow came together more completely and beautifully from a distance.  His description of her makes her seem the living embodiment of one of those Impressionist painting where you only can appreciate it by backing away.  Only after seeing Rachel on the stage did Proust begin to get some inkling, vague still, of what Robert saw in her.  After seeing her on the stage for the first time Robert was completely smitten and then did her best to approach her as if she here a leading diva, before finally winning her over.  While reading this passage over again I had three Neil Young songs playing in my head: A Man Needs a Maid, Motion Pictures, and Ambulance Blues.  Rachel is somewhere in the middle of the Venn diagram of these three songs.