My Year With Proust - Day 316

Perhaps, to form a picture of these, we ought to think, if not of the wild animals that never become domesticated, of the lion-cubs, allegedly tamed, which are still lions at heart, then at least of the negroes whom the comfortable existence of the white man renders desperately unhappy and who prefer the risks of life in the wild and its incomprehensible joys. When the day has dawned on which they have discovered themselves to be incapable at once of lying to others and of lying to themselves, they go away to live in the country, shunning the society of their own kind (whom they believe to be few in number) from horror of the monstrosity or fear of the temptation, and that of the rest of humanity from shame.  Never having arrived at true maturity, plunged in a constant melancholy, from time to time, on a moonless Sunday evening, they go for a solitary walk as far as a crossroads where, although not a word has been said, there has come to meet them one of their boyhood friends who is living in a house in the neighbourhood.  And they begin again the pastimes of long ago, on the grass, in the night, without exchanging a word.  During the week, they meet in their respective houses, talk of this and that, without any allusion to what has occurred between them - exactly as thought they had done nothing and would not do anything again - save, in their relations, a trace of coldness, or irony, irritability and rancour, sometimes of hatred.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 647-648

Proust continues his discourse on the solitaries, those who have cut themselves off from life, and in many ways from themselves, because of fear of society's response to their homosexuality.  In a lovely sentence Proust observes, "When the day has dawned on which they have discovered themselves to be incapable at once of lying to others and of lying to themselves, they go away to live in the country, shunning the society of their own kind (whom they believe to be few in number) from horror of the monstrosity or fear of the temptation, and that of the rest of humanity from shame."  There are many sad passages in Remembrance of Things Past, but I find this to be one of the most haunting because it deals with the struggle between a person's own desires and nature and the constraints places upon them by society; and in the case of the solitaries, wherein they are all too often active agents in their own confinement.