My Year With Proust - Day 225

   "In the country, Mme de Marsantes was adored for the good that she did, but principally because the purity of a blood-line into which for many generations there had flowed only what was greatest in the history of France had rid her manner of everything that the lower orders call 'airs' and had endowed her with perfect simplicity.  She never shrank from embracing a poor woman who was in trouble, and would tell her to come up to the house for a cartload of wood.  She was, people said, the perfect Christian.  She was determined to find an immensely rich wife for Robert.  Being a great lady means playing the great lady, that is to say, to a certain extent, playing at simplicity.  It is a pastime which costs a great deal of money, all the more because simplicity charms people only on condition that they know that you are capable of not living simply, that is to say that you are very rich.  Someone said to me afterwards, when I mentioned that I had seen her: 'You saw of course that she must have been lovely as a young woman.' But true beauty is so individual, so novel always, that one does not recognise it as beauty.  It said to myself that afternoon only that she had a tiny nose, very blue eyes, a long neck and a sad expression."

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, p. 260

Proust is discussing, briefly, the life and efforts of Mme de Marsantes, who was described as "the perfect Christian."  It is sad that so few people earn that title, although I suppose it's no better or worse than the distressingly small percentage of folks who qualify as "the perfect Muslim" or "the perfect Hindu" or "the perfect Buddhist" or "the perfect Sikh" or "the perfect Jew."  Of course, I suppose it's a lot easier to "the perfect ______" when you're fabulously wealthy.  It is doubtless easy to romanticize the issue, but I wonder if it can be argued that the rich used to feel a greater sense of obligation to the rest of society, almost a sense, probably inspired by religion, that they were blessed and thus owed it to the larger community to share their wealth.  I'm sure no one ever confused Andrew Carnegie with being a nice man, but he did give back to society; how many Carnegie libraries are there?  Franklin Delano Roosevelt came from a lot of wealth, but he also used the presidency to help the lower classes decimated by the Great Depression.  Somewhere along the way the super rich (not all of them, naturally) seemed to become more rapacious, and essentially declared class war on the rest of society (and not vice-versa).  Which leads us to Donald Trump, who views the presidency as a money-making venture, and certainly has no trouble promoting violence and sowing racial and religious hatred to further his cause.  Of course, this post may be inspired by how much Downton Abbey I've been watching (which, by the way, is nice but I think is dramatically over-rated; hasn't this been done previously and much more intelligently in Brideshead Revisited and Upstairs Downstairs?).

Beyond that typically socialist mini-rant, I was also taken by Proust's statement, "But true beauty is so individual, so novel always, that one does not recognise it as beauty."  We've talked a lot about beauty and perception and the interrelationship between the two, but in this case Proust seems to be taking it a step further.