"Sometimes I lifted my eyes to gaze at some huge old dwelling-house whose shutters had not been closed and in which amphibious men and women, adapting themselves anew each evening to living in a different element from their day-time one, floated slowly to and fro in the rich liquid that after nightfall rose incessantly from the wells of the lamps to fill the rooms to the very brink of their outer walls of stone and glass, the displacement of their bodies send oleaginous golden ripples through it. I proceeded on my way, and often, in the dark alley that ran past the cathedral, as long ago on the road to Meseglise, the force of my desire caught and held me; it seemed that a woman must be on the point of appearing, to satisfy it; if, in the darkness, I suddenly felt a skirt brush past me, the violence of the pleasure which I then felt made it impossible for me to believe that the contact was accidental and I attempted to seize in my arms a terrified stranger. This gothic alley meant for me something so real that if I had been successful in picking up and enjoying a woman there, it would have been impossible for me not to believe that it was the ancient charm of the place that was bringing us together, even if she were no more than a common street-walker, stationed there every evening, whom the wintry night, the strange place, the darkness, the mediaeval atmosphere had invested with their mysterious glamour. I thought of what might be in store for me; to try to forget Mme de Guermantes seemed to me to be painful, but sensible, and for the first time possible, even perhaps easy."
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 95-96
This is one of my favorite sections from The Guermantes Way for a couple reasons. First off, here we are twelve hundred pages in Remembrance of Things Past and I think this is Proust's strongest description of desire, pure physical desire. He's talked a lot about it philosophically, but here he does a wonderful job explaining the enormity of overpowering physical desire. At the same time, there is something almost a little creepy about his description: "the force of my desire caught and held me; it seemed that a woman must be on the point of appearing, to satisfy it; if, in the darkness, I suddenly felt a skirt brush past me, the violence of the pleasure which I then felt made it impossible for me to believe that the contact was accidental and I attempted to seize in my arms a terrified stranger." Now, again, is he speaking purely hypothetically, or is he actually recounting an incident where he grabbed a woman in the alley? Just as social privilege plays a central role in the novel, why wouldn't male privilege be a fit subject for analysis? Did Proust actually grab a woman because he knew that as a man he could?
I especially liked his description at the beginning of the passage of "amphibious men and women, adapting themselves anew each evening to living in a different element from their day-time one." We often think of "home" as having a special, concrete places in our lives, but for many people it is just a transitional period in between time spent at work or with friends. It sounds like I'm trying to be facetious, but at work you might spend eight or ten hours on point and in contact with others, and then mainly two hours at night before chores and bedtime takes over. Why would work be the transitional, immaterial part of the day?
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