My Year With Proust - Day 304

"That is why, as an antidote to the boredom of returning home alone, I should rather like to make friends with a sleeping-car attendant or a bus conductor.  Now, don't be shocked," the Baron wound up, "it is all a question of type.  With what you might call 'young gentlemen,' for instance, I feel no desire for physical possession, but I am never satisfied until I have touched them, I don't mean physically, but touched a responsive chord.  As soon as, instead of leaving my letters unanswered, a young man starts writing to me incessantly, when he is morally, as it were, at my disposal, I am assuaged, or at least I would be were I not immediately seized with an obsession for another."

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 633-634

M. de Charlus holding forth with Jupien after the consummation of their tryst.  It started off, as we discussed last time, with him asking Jupien questions about other men in the neighborhood, which seemed to be an attempt to make the younger man jealous; that this was part of the performance of their relationship.  However, M. de Charlus then continues on, explaining his desire.  What struck me, if we can believe M. de Charlus, is the peculiarity of desire.  He states, "I feel no desire for physical possession, but I am never satisfied until I have touched them.  I don't mean physically, but touched a responsive chord."  I think this makes a lot of sense.  As I've proposed before, a lot of sex occurs simply because we want something very different, more transcendent or at least more ethereal, but we lack the emotional or intellectual subtlety to make our desires known, so we fall back upon the physical.