My Year With Proust - Day 144

"Together we should have roamed that island impregnated with so intense a charm for me because it had enclosed the everyday life of Mlle de Stermaria and was reflected in the memory of her eyes.  For it seemed to me that I should truly have possessed her only there, when I had traversed those regions which enveloped her in so many memories - a veil which my desire longed to tear aside, one of those veils which nature imposes between woman and her pursuers (with the same intention as when, for all of us, she places the act of reproduction between ourselves and our keenest pleasure, and for insects, places before the nectar the pollen which they must carry away with them) in order that, tricked by the illusion of possessing her thus more completely, they may be forced to occupy first the scenes among which she lives and which, of more service to their imagination than sensual pleasure can be, yet would not without that pleasure have sufficed to attract them."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 741-742

Here Proust is imagining the affair that he might have had with Mlle de Stermaria if they had only been left alone.  Instead of being "Obliged by her father's presence to adopt a conventional attitude," they could have given themselves to a more natural relationship and pleasure, and "we should perhaps have been able to wander by ourselves at evening, she and I together in the twilight through which the pink flowers of the bell heather would glow more softly above the darkening water, beneath oak trees beaten and stunted by the pounding of the waves."  Proust's metaphoric landscape is normally sculpted with such delicacy that this section almost reads like soft core porn.  The beauty of Remembrance of Things Past is that it never stops at the surface level, no matter how beautifully a description or reflection is rendered.   I love his proposal that he could only have truly possessed her in her Breton castle, "when I had traversed those regions which enveloped her in so many memories."  It seems to me that Proust is suggesting (and I completely agree with him) that there are many different levels of possessing a woman, with the purely physical one being, naturally, the most fleeting and the least satisfying.  This is almost Proust's hierarchy of needs, as we move on to heart and then soul and then memory.  I've mentioned before one of my favorite lines from Milan Kundera where he proposes that the surest way to get a woman into bed is through her sadness.  Maybe this is true because it unfairly and cruelly jumps several levels and goes right to memory.