My Year With Proust - Day 292

. . . A moment later, I again recoiled, in order not to be seen by Jupien.  It was nearly time for him to set out for the office, from which he would return only for dinner, and not always even then during the last week since his niece and her apprentices had gone to the country to finish a dress for a customer.  Then, realising that no one could see me, I decided not to let myself be disturbed again for fear of missing, should the miracle be fated to occur, the arrival, almost beyond the possibility of hope (across so many obstacles of distance, of adverse risks, of dangers), of the insect sent from so far away as ambassador to the virgin who had been waiting for so long.  I knew that this expectancy was no more passive than in the male flower, whose stamens had spontaneously curved so that the insect might more easily receive their offering; similarly the female flower that stood here would coquettishly arch her "styles" if the insect came, and, to be more effectively penetrated by him, would imperceptibly advance, like a hypocritical but ardent damsel, to meet him half-way.  The laws of the vegetable kingdom are themselves governed by increasingly higher laws.  If the visit of an insect, that is to say the transportation of the seed from another flower, is generally necessary for the fertilisation of a flower, that is because self-fertilisation, the insemination of a flower by itself, would lead, like a succession of intermarriages in the same family. to degeneracy and sterility, whereas the crossing effected by insects gives to the subsequent generation of the same species a vigour unknown to their forebears.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 624-625

We're in the middle of a very long, although I guess not by Proustian standards, paragraph setting up the assignation between M. de Charlus and Jupien, and I decided to break it up, although I don't know if I managed to do so thematically.  Mainly I just just thinking of something while I was typing in the text and decided to stop there before the idea disappeared.  Once again Proust is using the nature, and especially the reproduction of flowers, as a metaphor for love and especially sex.  However, I'm come back to this theme next time.  What struck me here is that the scene opens with Marcel somewhere operating as some uncomfortable mixture of observer, stalker, snoop and spy.  It starts off with him not wanting to be seen because he doesn't want to be disturbed, but it is quickly becomes a case of him spying on the two men.  And I began to think: isn't all art the act of spying on others people's personal lives; and in the process, spying upon our own lives?  For some reason I'm reflecting back on the Christopher Nolan film Following, the one before Memento, where the protagonist gets drawn into a dark world of crime.  It's an effective film noir, but also a film, again like Memento, which leaves you thinking about reality and perception and identity.  In Following the lead character, out of boredom mainly, decides to start following a man in a large city, and eventually gets drawn into his life, with dangerous consequences.  Isn't this what all artists do?  The characters are fictional, but are probably based on some real character, or an adaption of some aspect of a real character, that the artist witnessed somewhere along the way as they walked through life.  Unless you're Dickens and can just create hundreds of characters out of whole cloth (if he did - certainly David Copperfield is pretty close to his life; maybe Dickens was just the most observant person of all time) don't artist always fill their art with people they've observed?  Of course, if you've been involved with an artist I guess you can expect to find yourself immortalized in one form or another in their work, which again brings me back to a film, as it always does, this time Woody Allen's response to his ex-wife's book in Manhattan.  Art is an intensely emotional and lonely and self-reflective process, but eventually maybe you learn more about yourself based on your perception of those around you.