Then the solitary languishes alone. He has not other diversion than to go to the neighbouring water-place to ask for some information or other from a certain railwaysman there. But the latter has obtained promotion, has been transferred to the other end of the country; the solitary will no longer be able to go and ask him the times of the trains or the price of a first-class ticket, and, before retiring to dream, Griselda-like, in his tower, loiters upon the beach, a strange Andromeda whom no Argonaut will come to free, a sterile jellyfish that must perish upon the sand, or else he stands idly on the platform until his train leaves, casting over the crowd of passengers a look that will seem indifferent, disdainful or abstracted, to those of another race, but, like the luminous glow with which certain insects bedeck themselves in order to to attract others of their species, or like the nectar which certain flowers offer to attract the insects that will fertilise them, would not escape the almost undiscoverable connoisseur of a pleasure too singular, too hard to place, which is offered him, the confrere with whom our specialist could converse in the strange tongue - in which at best some seedy loafer on the platform will put up a show of interest, but for pecuniary gain alone, like those people who, at the College de France, in the room in which the Professor of Sanskrit lectures without an audience, attend his course only for the sake of keeping warm. Jellyfish! Orchid! When I followed my instinct only, the jellyfish used to revolt me at Balbec; but if I had the eyes to regard them, like Michelet, from the standpoint of natural history and aesthetics, I saw an exquisite blue girandole. Are they not, with the transparent velvet of their petals, as it were the mauve orchids of the sea? Like so many creatures of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, like the plant which would produce vanilla but, because in its structure the male organ is separated by a partition from the female, remains sterile unless the hummingbirds or certain tiny bees convey the pollen from one to the other, or man fertilises them by artificial means . . .
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 649-650
Proust is in the middle of another very long section, as he continues to ruminate on the life of the solitary, the homosexual who has cut himself off from society for fear of its condemnation. Here, again, he is using as a metaphor, comparing the solitary to "a sterile jellyfish that must perish upon the sand." Who wrote, and provided heart-breaking images and metaphors, or loneliness more consistently or brilliantly than Proust? It's impossible to read these lines and not think of Proust's own lonely life, forced into seclusion both by years of ill health but also by his overpowering need to write. Even if he himself was not actually a homosexual, how could he not feel compassion and a sense of kinship with a group cut off from the rest of society? And again, the loneliness that Proust envisions, "like those people who, at the College de France, in the room in which the Professor of Sanskrit lectures without an audience, attending his course only for the sake of keeping warm." It is interesting that Proust admits his owning changing perceptions here; "the jellyfish used to revolt me at Balbec." He admits that later, "I saw an exquisite blue girandole. Are they not, with the transparent velvet of their pets, as it were the mauve orchids of the sea?" Has he grown more tolerant, or does he just now have more personal experience? I'll return to this section tomorrow and pick it up at the end, and we'll talk more about this very biological and very sexual metaphor.
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