My Year With Proust - Day 34

" . . . Suddenly I stood still, unable to move, as happens when something appears that requires not only our eyes to take it in, but involves a deeper kind of perception and takes possession of the whole of our being.  A little girl, with fair, reddish hair, who appeared to be returning from a walk, and held a trowel in her hand, was looking at us, raising towards us a face powdered with pinkish freckles.  Her black eyes gleamed, and as I did not at that time know, and indeed have never since learned how to reduce to its objective elements any strong impression, since I had not, as they say, enough 'power of observation' to isolate the sense of their colour, for a long time afterwards, whenever I thought of her, the memory of those bright eyes at once present itself to me as a vivid azure, since her complexion was fair; so much so that, perhaps, if her eyes had not been quite so black - which was what struck me most forcibly on first meeting her - I should not have been, as I was, especially enamoured of their imaged blue.

   I gazed at her, at first with that gaze which is not merely a messenger from the eyes, but in whose window all the senses assemble and lean out, petrified and anxious, that gaze which would fain reach, touch, capture, bear off in triumph the body at which is is aimed, and the soul with the body; then (so frightened was I lest at any moment my grandfather and father, catching sight of the girl, might tear me away from her, by making me run on in front of them) with another, an unconsciously appealing look, whose object was to force her to pay attention to me, to see, to know me."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 148-149

I wish I could remember the first time I ever saw, and fell madly in love - or least was knocked for a proverbial loop - by seeing a beautiful young girl. As we've determined pretty thoroughly, I have a terrible memory - I'm like the anti-Proust.  In this case Proust is writing about the first time that he saw Gilberte, a name, in Proust's words, "bestowed on me like a talisman which might, perhaps, enable me some day to rediscover her."  Vaguely, I do remember my son, when he was maybe two or three, at some indistinct family wedding reception.  He was dressed up in a little suit, looking handsome, as has always been his wont.  My mother has always doted on him, and the rest of us, especially me, have existed only in our ability to bring him to her presence.  One time I shaved off my beard after having it for seventeen years, but my mother didn't notice for over two hours because she couldn't take her eyes off him.  However, at this particular wedding reception she saw a little girl and was clearly smitten, but she danced away from him, leaving him sad and confused.  Like all parents I felt his own pain far more than I'm sure he ever did.  We never want them to feel the slightest bit of pain, and to this day, while the reception itself is a blur, I can still remember his look of pain.