My Year With Proust - Day 145

   "Mme de Villeparisis's carriage moved fast.  I scarcely had time to see the girl who was coming in our direction; and yet - since the beauty of human beings is not like the beauty of things, and we feel that it is that of a unique creature, endowed with consciousness and free-will - as soon as her individuality, a soul still vague, a will unknown to me, presented a tiny picture of itself, enormously reduced but complete, in the depths of her indifferent eyes, at once, by a mysterious response of the pollen ready in me for the pistols that should receive it, I felt surging through me the embryo, equally vague, equally minute, of the desire not to let this girl pass without forcing her mind to become aware of my person, without preventing her desires from wandering to someone else, without insinuating myself into her dreams and possession of her heart.  Meanwhile our carriage had moved on; the pretty girl was already behind us; and as she had - of me - none of those notions which constitute a person in one's mind, her eyes, which had barely seen me, had forgotten me already.  Was it because I had caught but a momentary glimpse of her that I had found her so attractive?  It may have been.  In the first place, the impossibility of stopping when we meet a woman, the risk of not meeting her again another day, give her at once the same charm as a place derives from the illness or poverty that prevents us from visiting it, or the lustreless days which remain to us wot live from the battle in which we shall doubtless fall."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 765-766

We seem to be establishing a theme here: Proust ruminating about a woman that he almost met.  It reminds me, obviously, of that lovely and elegiac scene from the little train station in the mountains.  I don't know how you could read either of these two passages and not think of how they form a metaphor for Proust's own life.  He was so cut off from life itself by his health, or at least his family's response to his health, and then later by his self-generated isolation as he wrote furiously day after day.