My Year With Proust - Day 259

   But to this island, where even in summer there was often a mist, how much more gladly would I have brought Mme de Stermaria now that the cold season, the end of autumn had come!  If the weather that had prevailed since Sunday had not in itself rendered grey and maritime the scenes in which my imagination was living - as other seasons made them balmy, luminous, Italian - the hope of Mme de Stermaria mine in a few days' time would have been quite enough to raise, twenty times in an hour, a curtain of mist in my monotonously lovesick imagination.  In any event the fog which since yesterday had risen even in Paris not only made me think incessantly of the native province of the young women whom I had invited to dine with me, but since it was probable that it must after sunset invade the Bois, and especially the shores of the lake, far more thickly than the streets of the town, I felt that for me it would give the Isle of Swans a hint of that Breton island whose marine and misty atmosphere had always enveloped in my mind like a garment the pale silhouette of Mme de Stermaria.  Of course when we are young, at the age I had reached at the time of my walks along the Meseglise way, our desires, our beliefs confer on a woman's clothing an individual personality, an irreducible essence. We pursue the reality.  But by dint of allowing it to escape we end by noticing that, after all those vain endeavours which have led to nothing, something solid subsists, which is what we have been seeking.  We begin to isolate, identify what we love, we try to procure it for ourselves, if only by a stratagem.  Then, in the absence of our vanished faith, costume fills the gap, by means of a deliberate illusion.  I knew quite well that within half an hour of home I should not find mystery in Brittany.  But in walking arm in arm with Mme de Stermaria in the dusk of the island, by the water's edge, I should be acting like other men who, unable to penetrate the walls of a convent, do at least, before enjoying a woman, clothe her in the habit of a nun.

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 400-401

I'm trying to think back to my early days as a boy pretending to be a man (which probably, sadly, takes me through yesterday) as I reflect upon Proust's comments.  I'm intrigued by his observation that, "Of course when we are young, at the age I had reached at the time of my walks along the Meseglise way, our desires, our beliefs confer on a woman's clothing an individual personality, an irreducible essence." I think of how much time we spend imagining what a woman looked like under her clothes, and convincing her into take off her clothes (usually through the clumsiest of machinations, as compared to simply asking her) - and then the mystery truly begins.  The clothes are at least tangible, and as Proust opines, "We pursue the reality."  However, the clothes are not even real, but at least they are a "deliberate illusion."  As the great Canadian philosopher reminds us, "You're only real with your makeup on."

However, despite the mystery, we know that we're supposed to be doing something.  As Proust tells us, "But in walking arm in arm with Mme de Stermaria in the dusk of the island, by the water's edge, I should be acting like other men who, unable to penetrate the walls of a convent, do at least, before enjoying a woman, clothe her in the habit of a nun."