My Year With Proust - Day 310

OK, so I know I've mined this section twice before and commented on it - and will again tomorrow and the day after - but I just felt compelled to take a step back and include all of it, mainly because I think it represents the best and worst of Proust.  Since I'm commenting on this at length elsewhere I won't have much to say here:

Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the poet one day feted in every drawing room and applauded in every theatre in London, and the next day driven from every lodging, unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head, turning the mill like Samson and saying like him: "The two sexes shall die, each in a place apart!", excluded even, save on the days of general misfortune when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied round Dreyfus, from the sympathy - at times from the society - of their fellows, in whom they inspire each disgust at seeing themselves as they are, portrayed in a mirror which, ceasing to flatter them, accentuates every blemish that they have refused to observe in themselves, and makes them understand that what they have been calling their love (and to which, playing up the word, they have by association annexed all that poetry, music, chivalry, asceticism have contrived to add to love) springs not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen but from an incurable disease; like the Jews again (save some who will associate only with those of their face and have always on their lips the ritual words and the accepted pleasantries), shunning one another, who do not want their company, forgiving their rebuffs, enraptured by their condescensions; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism to which they have been subjected, the opprobrium into which they have fallen, having finally been invested, by a persecution similar to that of Israel, with the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often hideous, finding (in spite of all the mockery with which one who, more closely integrated with, better assimilated to the opposing race, is in appearance relatively less inverted, heaps upon one who has remained more so) a relief in frequenting the society of their kind, and even some support in their existence, so much so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of which is the vilest of insults), they readily unmask those who succeed in concealing the fact that they belong to it, with a view less to injuring them, though they have no scruple about that, than to excusing themselves and seeking out (as a doctor seeks out cases of appendicitis) cases of inversion in history, taking pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of themselves, as the Jews claim that Jesus was one of them, without reflecting that there were no abnormal people when homosexuality was the norm, no anti-Christians before Christ, that the opprobrium alone makes the crime because it has allowed to survive only those who remained obdurate to every warning, to every example, to every punishment, by virtue of an innate disposition so peculiar that it is more repugnant to other men (even though it may be accompanied by high moral qualities) than certain other vices which exclude those qualities, such as theft, cruelty, beach of faith, vices better understood and so readily excused by the generality of men; forming a freemasonry far more extensive, more effective and less suspected than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeships, knowledge, traffic, vocabulary, and one in which even members who do not wish ti know one another recognise one another immediately by natural or conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs which indicate one of his kind to the beggar in the person of the nobleman whose carriage door he is shutting, to the father in the person of the daughter's suitor, to the man who has sought healing, absolution or legal defence in the doctor, the priest or the barrister to whom he has had recourse; all of them obliged to protect their own secret but sharing with the others a secret which the rest of humanity does not suspect and which means that to them the most wildly improbably tales of adventure seem true, for in this life of anachronistic fiction the ambassador is a  bosom friend of the felon, the prince, with a certain insolent aplomb born of his aristocratic breeding which the timorous bourgeois lacks, on leaving the duchess's party goes off to confer in private with the ruffian; a reprobate section of the human collectivity, but an important one, suspected where it does not exist, flaunting itself, insolent and immune, where its existence is never guessed; numbering its adherents everywhere, among the people, in the army, in the church, in prison, on the throne; living, in short, at least to a great extent, in an affectionate and perilous intimacy with the men of the other race, provoking them, playing with them by speaking of its vice of something alien to it - a game that is rendered easy by the blindness of duplicity of the others, a game that may be kept up for years until the day of the scandal when these lion-tamers are devoured; obliged until then to make a secret of their lives, to avert their eyes from the direction in which they would wish to stray, to fasten them on what they would naturally turn away from, to change the gender of many of the adjectives in their vocabulary, a social constraint that is slight in comparison with the inward constraint imposed upon them by their vice, or what is improperly called, not so in relation to others as to themselves, and in such a way that to themselves it does not appear a vice.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 638-640

It wasn't until I was re-reading my notes that it dawned on me that this is ONE SENTENCE.  As is my wont I had scribbled notes all over the book and was planning on breaking it up into three or four different posts, and so I had apparently convinced myself that it was three or four different ungainly long sentences.  And then I realized that it's the mother of all sentences, although, truthfully, maybe not the longest sentence in Remembrance of Things Past.  I've decided that it's the Sentence Where Rhetoric Professors Go To Die.  Consequently, I'm officially challenging all my friends who teach Rhetoric or Composition to assign their students the job of untangling it, if for no other reason than a Scared Straight moment.  Recently I was talking to my good friend David Rous about Proust and he used the word "impenetrable", which I think is just about perfect.

At the same time, in other ways it's Proust at his most, well, Proustian.  Who else had the intelligence, vision, patience, singularity of vision - and, truthfully, audacity - to write like this?  Yesterday I was talking to my first year students about perception and they were reflecting, painfully, on the Proust I had shared with them early in the semester.  I reiterated that one of the reasons why I undertook this challenge was that in an age of social media I was finding it more and more difficult to slow down my mind and to dig more deeply, and I didn't even grow up online.  Say what you want about Proust, but who else ever saw the world like he saw it?  Reading Proust is definitely an acquired taste, and, as I've proposed, Proust makes Dickens read like James Ellroy, but it is beautiful, albeit maddeningly and exhaustingly so.