The most extraordinary stratagems that nature has devised to compel insects eto ensure the fertilisation of flowers which without their interveion could not be fertilised because the male flowers is too far away from the female - or the one which, if it is the wind that must provide for the transportation of the pollen, makes it so much more easily detachable from the male, so much more easily snatched from the air by the female flower, by eliminating the secretion of the nectar, which is no longer of any use since there are no insects to be attracted, and even the brilliance of the corollas which attract them - and the device which, in order that the flower may be kept free for the right pollen, which can fructify only in that particular flower, makes it secrete a liquid which rends it immune to all other pollens - seemed to me no more marvellous than the existence of the subvariety of inverts destined to guarantee the pleasures of love to the invert who is growing old: men who are attracted not by all other men, but - by a phenomenon of correspondence and harmony similar to those that govern the fertilisation of heterostyle trimorphous flowers like the lythrum salicaria - only by men considerably older than themselves. Of this subvariety Jupien had just furnished me with an example, one less striking however than certain others which every human herbalist, every moral botanist, will be able to observe in spite of their rarity, and which will show them a frail young man awaiting the advances of a robust and paunchy, quinquagenarian, and remaining as indifferent to hose of other young men as the hermaphrodite flowers of the short-styled primula veris remain sterile so long as they are fertilised only by other primulae veris of short style also, where they welcome with joy the pollen of the primula veris with the long style.
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 651-652
Proust ruminates about the amazing and seemingly inexplicable varieties of sexual desire, in this case that the fact that Jupien might actually desire M. de Charlus, and not just his station in life or the associated wealth. I've often joked that there is not one sub-variety of sexual desire that doesn't have its well-trolled website: librarians, girls with glasses, librarians with glasses, well pedicured feet of librarians with glasses, etc. One of the things that I struggled with when I was dating the beautiful British woman was the age difference (as I was twenty-two years older). She always said that it made no difference, but it really bothered me, and it took me a long time to get over; and even when I got over it I didn't like to see pictures of the two of us together (essentially, who was that old guy with that beautiful young woman?). It didn't make me feel young and vibrant, but instead seem to validate my decay. Even when I was relatively OK with it I assumed that she was with me because I was more mature (arguably, anyway) and stable and at a place in my life where I could put aside some of my desires and view our life and relationship with a more balanced sense of what was important. So, it didn't really occur to me that she would find me physically attractive, and that she mainly "put up with me" physically because of my other attributes. However, Proust is saying the opposite here. When I was a younger man I had the opposite experience in that I dated older women, sometimes much older; for example, when I was a senior I had a fling with a woman who was forty-five. So, in the long arc of my life I've operated within a range of forty-five years (twenty-two years older and twenty-three years younger) and despite some initial clumsy moments I was happy with all those relationships. Having said that, it also implies that I didn't have a "type" per se in that I wasn't always drawn to older women when I was younger nor have I been drawn to younger women when I've been older. Mainly I've just been surprised when any woman would talk to me, especially now that I've reached the age of total invisibility.
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