My Year With Proust - Day 255

   On reaching the door, surprised that I had not preceded her, she offered me her cheek, feeling that there was no need now for any coarse physical desire to prompt us to kiss one another.  The brief relations in which we had just indulged being of the sort to which a profound intimacy and heartfelt choice sometimes lead.  Albertine had felt it incumbent upon her to improvise and add provisionally to the kisses which we had exchanged on my bed the sentiment of which those kisses would have been the symbol for a knight and his lady such as they might have been conceived by a Gothic minstrel.

   When she had left me, this young Picarde who might have been carved on his porch by the sculptor of Saint-Andre-des-Champs, Francoise brought me a letter which filled me with joy, for it waas from Mme de Stermaria, who accepted my invitation to dinner on Wednesday.  From Mme de Stermaria - that was to say, for me, not so much from the real Mme de Stermaria as from the one whom I had been thinking all day before Albertine's arrival.  It is the terrible deception of love that it begins by engaging us in play not with a woman of the external world but with a doll fashioned in our brain - the only woman moreover that we have always at our disposal the only one we shall ever possess - whom the arbitrary power of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the Balbec of my dreams had been from the real Balbec; an artificial creation which by degrees, and to our own hurt, we shall force the real woman to assemble.

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, p. 384

Once again, it is also perception and memory, or the perception of a memory: "It is the terrible deception of love that it begins by engaging us in play not with a woman of the external world but with a doll fashioned in our brain - the only woman moreover that we have always at our disposal the only one we shall ever possess - whom the arbitrary power of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the Balbec of my dreams had been from the real Balbec. . ." It's strange how the human mind works.  Reading that line reminded me of the end of the great Tanizaki novel Some Prefer Nettles (long before I discovered Murakami I clearly had a fascination with modern Japanese fiction), which I haven't thought of in years, and how Misako's father would dress up his mistress O-Hisa as a doll.  We never actually possess the "woman of the external world," but maybe we never really wanted her in the first place.