My Year With Proust - Day 305

   From the beginning of this scene my eyes had been opened by a transformation in M. de Charlus as complete and as immediate as if he had been touched by a magician's wand.  Until then, because I had not understood, I had not seen.  Each man's vice (we use the term for the sake of linguistic convenience) accompanies him through life after the manner of the familiar genius who was invisible to men so long as they were unaware of his presence.  Out kindness, our treachery, our name, our social relations do not disclose themselves to the eye, we carry them hidden within us.  Ulysses himself did not recognise Athena at first.  But the gods are immediately perceptible to one another, like as quickly to like, and so to had M. de Charlus been to Jupien.  Until that moment, in the presence of M. de Charlus I had been in the position of an unobservant man who, standing before a pregnant woman whose distended outline he has failed to remark, persists while she smilingly reiterates "Yes, I'm a little tired just now," in asking her tactlessly: "Why, what's the matter with you?"  But let someone say to him: "She is expecting a child," and suddenly he catches sight of her stomach and ceases to see anything else.  It is the explanation that opens our eyes, the dispelling of an error gives us an additional sense.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 635-636

Proust continues to reflect upon M. de Charlus, whom, he realizes, he had never seen before.  Now he felt, for the first time, that he saw him for what he was.  Even if we do see someone, do we truly "see" them?  Proust proposes,  "Each man's vice (we use the term for the sake of linguistic convenience) accompanies him through life after the manner of the familiar genius who was invisible to men so long as they were unaware of his presence."  So, people walk beside us, but they might as well be ghosts.  I think it was Marcus Aurelius who suggested that we are souls carrying around corpses.  We hide who we are.  "Out kindness, our treachery, our name, our social relations do not disclose themselves to the eye, we carry them hidden within us."  However, according to Proust, M. de Charlus and Jupien had seen each other, had seen what they hid from others, which he compares to the gods walking among the humans in the Greek and Roman epics.  "Ulysses himself did not recognise Athena at first.  But the gods are immediately perceptible to one another,"  The human heroes did not recognize the gods, but the gods always recognize each other.  Now, did M. de Charlus and Jupien recognize each other because they were sending out signals on a particular frequency, or because they were receiving signals on a specific frequency?  I proposed once that people who are unhappily married send out signals that other people in the same boat immediately recognize, making affairs easy if not inevitable.  But, are they doing this consciously or unconsciously, intellectually or biologically?