My Year With Proust - Day 158

"I could say to myself with conviction that neither in Paris nor at Balbec, on the most favourable assumption of what, even if I had been able to stop and talk to them, the passing women who had caught my eye would have been like, had there ever been any whose appearance, followed by their disappearance without my having got to know them, had left me with more regret than would these, had given me the idea that their friendship could be so intoxicating.  Never, among actresses or peasants or convent girls, had I seen anything so beautiful, impregnated with so much that was unknown, so inestimably precious, so apparently inaccessible.  They were, of the unknown and potential happiness of life, an illustration so delicious and in so perfect a state that it was almost for intellectual reasons that I was sick with despair at the thought of being unable to sample, in unique conditions which left no room for any possibility of error, all that is most mysterious in the beauty we desire, and which we console ourselves for never possessing by demanding pleasure - as Swann had always refused to do before Odette's day - from women whom we have not desire, so that we die without ever having known what that other pleasure was.  It might well be, of course, that it was not in reality an unknown pleasure, that on close inspection its mystery would dissolve, that it was not more than a projection, a mirage of desire."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 855

Proust continues his dialogue about the perception and reality of beauty.  He had just become entranced by the young cyclist, which was the subject of yesterday's post, and then began to consider her troop of friends, "the tribe."  In the end he is quickly smitten by all of them, which I think gives us a clue to his view of beauty and love as ideals more than reality.  "Never, among actresses or peasants or convent girls, had I seen anything so beautiful, impregnated with so much that was unknown, so inestimably precious, so apparently inaccessible."  He seems to be in love with their potential, more with the dream of the possibility of a relationship than the actual relationship, going back to an earlier discussion.  I've talked about a good friend of mine who is perpetually love sick, often in regard to one woman but also in a more general sense because of a lack of a love in his life.  I try to tell him to not romanticize the whole thing, because the other side of being in a relationship is being in a relationship, the other side of having someone to come home to is having someone to come home to.  And doubtless, if he were in a relationship, he'd, like the rest of the planet, dream of not being in a relationship.  This is more than the simple truism of wanting what you don't have.  To me this goes back to the discussion we've been having about the difference between beauty and Beauty.  The potential that Proust sees in the tribe speaks to Beauty because it is pristine; it has never been contaminated by reality.  Why isn't beauty enough?  There is a reason that Dostoevsky referred to human beings as the "ungrateful biped."