My Year With Proust - Day 23

"Legrandin's face showed an extraordinary zeal and animation; he made a profound bow, with a subsidiary backward movement which brought his spine sharply up into a position behind its starting-point, a gesture in which he must have been trained by the husband of his sister, Mme de Cambremer.  This rapid recovery caused a sort of tense muscular wave to ripple over Legrandin's hips, which I had not supposed to be so fleshy; I cannot say why, but this undulation of pure matter, this wholly carnal fluency, with not the least hint in it of spiritual significance, this wave lashed to a fury by the wind of an assiduity, an obsequiousness of the basest sort, awoke my mind suddenly to the possibility of a Legrandin altegether different from the one whom we knew."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 131

I don't necessarily know why I find this little snippet so interesting.  Legrandin is a fairly minor character who walks through a few scenes, but who nevertheless seems to have something odd or at least noticeable to say or do.  In this particular case Proust appears to notice that another person is actually, in fact, a person, and has a body   All of us, even the most sensitive, is at heart solipsistic in that we assume that all the people in our lives exist only in the most tangential fashion, mainly as foils in the passion play that constitutes our life.  And when we don't need them they disrobe and wait quietly in the green room, or, like the angels in Wings of Desire, in the stacks of the library, until they are called back on stage.  Or maybe they don't exist at all, and are only created out of nothing by our thoughts (as least this is what I assure my students when I'm in the mood to rile them up).  Of course,it works both ways, as any professor will tell you who has experienced the sense of excitement/dread that a student exhibits when they run into them doing something as mundane as buying groceries at Shaw's on the weekend.  I think they assume that we, like Chinese hungry ghosts that can't get over the door stop, bounce endlessly around our classrooms.  However, as St. Augustine reminds us, "In piss and shit we are born." Essentially, that we do live in this messy, although sweet, old world.  Freeland in Portraits & Persons, the bane of my freshmen's existence, discusses the different aspects of the self: moral, relational, reflective and, yes, physical; we do live in this body, beset as it is by pain and decay and desire.