My Year With Proust - Day 313

Some - those no doubt who have been most timid in childhood - are not greatly concerned with the kind of physical pleasure they receive, provided that they can associate it with a masculine face.  Whereas others, whose sensuality is doubtless more violent, feel an imperious need to localise their physical pleasure.  These latter, perhaps, would shock the average person with their avowals.  They live perhaps less exclusively beneath the sway of Saturn's outrider, since for them woman are not entirely excluded as they are for the former sort, in relation to whom women have no existence apart from conversation, flirtation, loves not of the heart but of the head.  But the second sort seek out those women who love other women, who can procure for them a young man, enhance the pleasure they experience in his company; better still, they can, in the same fashion, enjoy with such women the same pleasure as a man.  Whence it arises that jealousy is kindled in those who love the first sort only by the pleasure which they may enjoy with a man, which alone seems ot their lovers a betrayal, since they do not participate in the love of women, have practiced it only out of habit and to preserve for themselves the possibility of eventual marriage, visualising so little the pleasure that it is capable of giving that they cannot be distressed by the thought that he whom they love is enjoying that pleasure; whereas the other sort often inspire jealousy by their love affairs with women.  For, in their relations with women, they play, for the woman who loves her own sex, the part of another woman, and she offers them at the same time more or less what they find in other men, so that the jealous friends suffers from the feeling that the man he loves is riveted to the woman who is to him almost a man, and at the same time feels his beloved almost escape him because, to these women, he is something which the lover himself cannot conceive, a sort of woman.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 645-646

Proust is commenting on the complexity of sexuality and sexual desire.  Truthfully, I'm still processing this passage and my thoughts are not fully formed, so I'm sure I'm going to come back to this one when I have more time.  Proust writes, "Some - those no doubt who have been most timid in childhood - are not greatly concerned with the kind of physical pleasure they receive, provided that they can associate it with a masculine face.   Whereas others, whose sensulity is doubtless more violent, feel an imperious need to localise their physical pleasure."  The concept of localizing physical pleasure is fascinating, as is the concept of how one's childhood shapes their sexual nature.

I also  need to do some research on the phrase "Saturn's outrider".

Essentially, I'm not there yet, but I decided to go ahead and publish this and come back to it later.