"That day, as for some days past, Saint-Loup had been obliged to go to Doncieres, where, until he returned there for good, he would be on duty now until late every afternoon. I was sorry that he was not at Balbec. I had seen some young women, who at a distance had seemed to me lovely, alighting from carriages and entering either the ballroom of the Casino or the ice-cream shop. I was going through one of those phases of youth, devoid of any particular love, as it were in abeyance, in which at all times and in all places - as a lover the woman by whose charms he is smitten - we desire, we seek, we see Beauty. Let but a single flash of reality - the glimpse of a woman from afar or from behind - enable us to project the image of Beauty before our eyes, and we imagine that we have recognised it, our hearts beat, and we will always remain half-persuaded that it was She, provided that the woman has vanished: it is only if we manage to overtake her that we realise our mistake."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 845
Obviously, Proust talks a lot about beauty and also a lot about Beauty, but I think this is one of his nicer reflections because it really speaks to the ethereal nature of Beauty. Is Beauty, as compared to beauty, just a product of the imagination? Maybe beauty is around us all the time, is more tangible, whereas Beauty has a more Platonic World of Form quality to it. The problem with that is that it implies a greater universality to the concept of Beauty than I think actually exists. Essentially, we can certainly disagree on what is beautiful, but can we disagree on what is Beautiful? You might not agree with me that Juliette Binoche is the most beautiful woman in the world, but beauty is a more subjective concept. [That said, you're sadly and stupidly wrong, because, as every right-thinking individual knows, Juliette Binoche IS the most beautiful woman in the world] Theoretically, shouldn't we all agree on Beauty? This takes me back to the notion that maybe Beauty is just an imagined, and deeply personal, concept. Maybe we share the concept of Beauty, although the specifics vary from individual to individual. This is why a fleeting glimpse would "enable us to project the image of Beauty before our eyes." The reason why Proust, or anyone for that matter, would realize the mistake once they had overtaken their object of Beauty, is not because their eyes are too far apart or their nose slightly askew, but because they are real. It seems to me that so much of Proust, or at least so much of my childish understanding of Proust, relates to liminal spaces, in this case the hazy border area between beauty and Beauty. Maybe we as human beings are just poorly constructed to perceive Beauty; we can vaguely see that it's there, but our perception isn't finely tuned enough to truly "see" it. The clear comparison would be to our frustrating inability to see God. One of the 99 Names of Allah is the Beautiful, and every religion has some similar notion that the Divine is beautiful. We can agree upon its truth but we still can't see it. We're all perceptually near-sighted, and we fill in the specifics of that blurry image with our notion of what it should be. And maybe this is why we're so unhappy, why we mess up so many relationships - we're expecting Beauty and find only beauty, and can't negotiate the difference.
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