My Year With Proust - Day 346

In the whole universe I now desired only two women, of whose faces I could not, it is true, form any picture, but whose names Saint-Loup had given me and whose compliance he had guaranteed.  So that if, by what he had said this evening, he had set my imagination a heavy task, he had at the same time procured an appreciable relaxation, a prolonged rest for my will.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 750

Marcel's friend Robert Saint-Loup describes two women to him and he is suddenly and overpowering aflame with desire, even though he's never seen them.  To me this brings us back to one of the essential truths about desire - it's all about anticipation, about what the imagination promises, which is inevitably far greater than what is delivered; or, maybe more accurately, what you deliver when you discover that your imagination has once again far out-paced reality.  How often have you driven two hours in the middle of the night based on the promise of a once in a lifetime assignation (as expressed nicely in the Sara Evans song Four-Thirty, which falls into that unique musical category of Even Nice Christian Girls Get the Urge; I know that there are a dozen Lucinda Williams songs that handle this better, but I think the Evans song fits in better with our theme) only to discover that the person waiting for you is, well, a person, you need to rekindle your imagination, essentially removing yourself from the reality you just drove two hours to consummate, to find inspiration.

Proust provides more information about the two women:

Ever since Saint-Loup had spoken to me of a young girl of good family who frequented a house of ill-fame, and of the Baroness Pubtus's chambermaid, it was in these two persons that now become coalesced and embodied the desires inspired in me day by day by countless beauties of two classes, on the one hand the vulgar and magnificent, and majestic lady's maids of great houses, swollen with pride and saying "we" in speaking of duchesses, and on the other hand those girls of whom it was enough for me sometimes, without even having seen them go past in carriages or on foot, to have read the names in the account of a ball for me to fall in love with them and, having conscientiously searched the social directory for the country houses in which they spent the summer (as often as not letting myself bed led astray by a similarity of names), to dream alternately of going to live amid the plains of the West, the dunes of the North, the pine-woods of the South. But in vain did I fuse together all the most exquisite fleshly matter to compose, after the ideal outline traced for me by Saint-Loup, the young girl of easy virtue and Mme Putbus's maid, my two possessible beauties still lacked what I should never know until I had seen them: individual character. (p. 749)

Somewhere in my dissolute youth, although I suspect probably just in a movie, I remember someone giving the sage advise that you should treat queens like whores and whores like queens (truthfully, I don't remember where I heard it).  The advise is, as Woody Allen would opine, pithy yet degenerate, and I bring it up because it has this peculiar truth: that you should not let your treatment of someone be determined solely by your perception of what or who they are.  I know that any reader of this blog will, quite naturally and appropriately, bring up the fact that I often will quote (well, paraphrase) Confucius's admonition that clean water is used to wash the face and dirty water is used to wash the feet, and thus your nature determines your treatment, but we'll leave that alone for the moment.  In this section, from the previous page in Cities of the Plain, Proust describes the two women who are dominating his desire, and how they provide a duality, on the one hand the "vulgar and magnificent" and on the other society women "without even having seen them go past in carriages." Clearly part of their charm is that they fall into lovely categories, and men, as Swann related a couple posts ago, are collectors.  Even Proust has to admit that, "my two possessible beauties still lacked what I should have never known until I had seen them: individual character."  Which, in the end, I would propose, brings us back to the question of anticipation, which is seldom sullied by individual character, that is, reality.