My Year With Proust - Day 281

   "Babal, you're divine, you know everything," cried the Duchess.

   "But you yourself, Oriane, have taught me things I had no idea of," the Princesse de Parme assured her.

   "I must explain to Your Highness that it's Swann who has always talked to me a great deal about botany.  Sometimes when we thought it would be too boring to go to an afternoon party we would set off for the country, and he would show me extraordinary marriages between flowers, which was far more amusing than going to human marriages - no wedding-breakfast and no crowd in the sacristy.  We never had time to go very far.  Now that motor-cars have come in, it would be delightful.  Unfortunately, in the meantime he himself was made an even more astonishing marriage, which makes everything more difficult.  Ah, Ma'am, life is a dreadful business, we spend our whole time doing things that bore us, and when by chance we come across somebody with whom we could go and look at something really interesting, he has to make a marriage like Swann's.  Faced with the alternatives of giving up my botanical expeditions and being obliged to call upon a degrading person, I chose the first of these two calamities.  Actually, though, there's no need to go quite so far.  It seems that even here, in my own little bit of garden, more improper things happen in broad daylight than at midnight . . . in the Bois de Boulogne!  Only they attract no attention, because between flowers it's all done quite simply - you see a little orange shower, or else a very dusty fly coming to wipe its feet or take a bath before crawling into a flower.  And that does the trick!"

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 536-537

The conversation continues, which we dealt with yesterday, that is ostensibly about nature, but operates on a deeper level as a reflection on love and sex.  It's impossible to read it and not wonder about the true nature of the relationship between the Duchess and Swann.  However, I think the question of whether or not their relationship is sexual is much less interesting to me than the issue of the fragility of male-female friendships.  As the Duchess explains, "Ah, Ma'am, life is a dreadful business, we spend our whole time doing things that bore us, and when by chance we come across somebody with whom we could go and look at something really interesting, he has to make a marriage like Swann's."  It could very well be that their relationship was perfectly platonic, and that it was eventually ruined by Swann's marriage, and not simply because he married, in the eyes of polite society, a "whore," but rather that he married at all.  How delicate and transitory is a friendship between a man and a woman? We think they end because you end up sleeping together, but I think it's more complicated than that.  I've been blessed over the years to have had a series of very intimate relationships with women that, in the end, had nothing to do with sex.  In the end we contributed something very different and balancing to each other's lives, and it was uncontaminated by sex.  Going back to my undergraduate days and my friendship with Illene, and then Janan and Debi when when I taught in Atlanta, and Sarah and Cyndi up here in Vermont - I've had a series of "relationships" that were intimate and enriching and perfectly stable little pseudo-marriages, without all of the concomitant drama.  Even my long marriage to Brenda was, as I've stated, much more a deep friendship than a passionate love affair, and that is what made the parting so painful and devastating.  Sadly, these friendships tend to be as fragile as spider webs, because, like Swann, one or the other marries, and then things get complicated.  I've been involved with some very passionate, but also very jealous (the two factors usually seem to be interrelated) women, who would not have understood the nature of my other friendships.  I would have been cheating on them daily, and in the worst say possible: emotionally.