My Year With Proust - Day 319

Like so many creatures of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, like the plant which would produce vanilla but, because in its structure the male organ is separated by a partition from the female, remains sterile unless the hummingbirds or certain tiny bees convey the pollen from one to the other, or man fertilises them by artificial means, M. de Charlus (and here the word fertilise must be understood in a moral sense, since the physical sense the union of male with male is and must be sterile, but it is no small matter for a person to be able to encounter the sole pleasure which he is capable of enjoying, and that "every creature here below" can impart to some other "his music or his fragrance or his flame"), M. de Charlus was one of those men who may be called exceptional because, however many they may be, the satisfaction, so easy for others, of their sexual needs depends upon the coincidence of too many conditions, and of conditions too difficult to meet.  For men like M. de Charlus (subject to the compromises which will appear in the course of this story and which the reader may already have sensed, enforced by the need of pleasure which resigns itself to partial acceptations), mutual love, apart from the difficulties, so great as to be almost insurmountable, which it encounters in the ordinary run of mortals, entails others so exceptional that what is always extremely rare for everyone becomes in their case well-night impossible, and, if they should chance to have an encounter which is really fortunate, or which nature makes appear so to them, their happiness is somehow far more extraordinary, selective, profoundly necessary than that of the normal lover.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 650-651

I can't figure out the origins of the quoted line "every creature here below . . . his music or his fragrance of his flame", which frustrates me.  It sounds like something from the Song of Solomon or from Corinthians or maybe even from Ecclesiastes, but I have yet to track it down so far.  I'm always hammering away at my students about, in addition to practical work skills or the ability to think and write, that there is also the coin of cultural literacy - and clearly I've failed in this instance because the passage, although it seems familiar, is dancing madly beyond my perception.  Still, I love it, and I do think that, if only we would try, we can impart to others "his music or his fragrance or his flame."  I don't think it is necessary for me to track down this line to understand Proust's point here, but it is definitely driving me crazy.

But back to the action - here Proust continues to dissect the nature and struggles of M. de Charlus, and for that matter all homosexuals during his age.  While I'm sure some, or maybe most, modern readers would chastise Proust for his views on homosexuality, I, again, am reading it in a different way.  It just seems to me that there is more understanding, albeit laced with sympathy and pity, than true condemnation from Proust.  He writes of the pain of these individuals who "enforced by the need of pleasure which resigns itself to partial acceptations."  Love is difficult to achieve even when you have all the societal encouragement and acceptance you can handle, but how difficult must it be when you are facing profound limits and reprimands from society?  Essentially, that all you can ever hope for are "partial acceptations."