My Year With Proust - Day 155

"And so, many easy-going men of the Faubourg Saint-Germain were without compunction when they spoke of Robert's mistress. 'Whores do their job,' they would say, 'they're as good as anybody else.  But not that one!  We can't forgive her.  She has done too much harm to a fellow we're fond of.' Of course, he was not the first to be thus ensnared.  But the others amused themselves like men of the world, continued to think like men of the world about politics and everything else.  Whereas Saint-Loup's family found him 'soured.' They failed to realise that for many young men of fashion who would otherwise remain uncultivated mentally, rough in their friendships, without gentleness or taste, it is very often their mistresses who are their real masters, and liaisons of this sort the only school of ethics in which they are initiated into a superior culture, where they learn the value of disinterested relations."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 838

Proust is recounting the general reaction to Robert Saint-Loup's mistress.  Obviously, there are several ways to unpack this brief section.  What jumps out at me is the notion of separation, and I am oddly reminded of my time teaching in Abu Dhabi.  The commentary shared by Proust is not only that of men, but men who are in many ways segregated from the rest of society.  When I was in Abu Dhabi the male students would ask questions about the female students - and the female students would ask questions about the male students - as if they were entirely different and unstudied species; I thought at the time that you could practically write a piece in a cryptozoological magazine about Emirati women.  A couple of years ago I taught a class called Arab Women Writers, which I loved and hope to teach again, and one of the themes that kept popping up from the female authors was this sense of isolation from their fathers.  It struck me as so strange because this was a society that places tremendous emphasis on family, but one which also constructed and accepted tremendous unassailable chasms, both inside and outside of the family.  In a way, the society that Proust is discussing mirrors the Arabic world I experienced.  The young men were dependent upon their mistresses to finish the job of "raising" them, and I can't help but wonder if it related to the fact that they were so generally isolated from whole segments of the population, especially the feminine.  Just think back to the beginning of the novel with Proust waiting in his room for his mother to steal a few moments away from the demands of her guests to tuck him into bed.