My Year With Proust - Day 40

   "Sometimes to the exhilaration which I derived from being alone would be added an alternative feeling, so that I could not be clear in my mind to which I should give the casting vote; a feeling stimulated by the desire to see rise up before my eyes a peasant-girl, whom I might clasp in my arms. . . But if this desire that a woman should appear added for me something more exalting than the charms of nature, they in their turn enlarged what I might, in the woman's charm, have found too much restricted.  it seemed to me that the beauty of the trees was hers also, and that, as for the spirit of those horizons, of the village of Rousainville, of the books which I was reading that year, it was her kiss which would make me master of them all; and, my imagination drawing strength from contact with my sensuality, my sensuality expanding through all the realms of my imagination, my desire had no longer any bounds.  Moreover - just as in moments of musing contemplation of nature, the natural actions of the mind being suspended, and our abstract ideas of things set on one side, we believe with the profoundest faith in the originality, in the individual existence of the place in which we may happen to be - the passing figure which my desire evoked seemed to be not any one example of the general type of 'woman', but a necessary and natural product of the soil.  For at that time everything which was not myself, the earth and the creatures upon it, seemed to me more precious, more important, endowed with a more real existence than they appear to full-grown men.  And between the earth and its creatures I made no distinction."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 165-166

For the first time Proust begins to talk, at least directly, about desire, but even here it is viewed through a philosophical and even spiritual lens. In Heroines & Heroes we've already spent time talking about Narratology and are moving into Psychoanalytical literary criticism, so Proust's use of words such as "enlarged", "expanding," "contact with my sensuality", "my desire had no longer any bounds" and "endowed" jump out at me - although my reading from H&H may be inspiring me to notice them more clearly.  That said, Proust is such a precise writer that me may just be having a little fun with the reader.  But I digress . . .