My Year With Proust - Day 347

   Since, whenever the outer gate opened, the concierge pressed an electric button which lighted the stairs, and since all the occupants of the building had already come in, I left the kitchen immediately and went to sit down in the hall, keeping my eyes fastened on the point where the slightly too n arrow curtain did not completely cover the glass panel of our front door, leaving visible a vertical strip of semi-darkness from the stairs.  If, suddenly, this strip turned a golden yellow, that would mean that Albertine had just entered the building and would be with me in a minute; nobody else could be coming at that time of night.  And I sat there, unable to take my eyes from the strip which persisted in remaining dark; I bent my whole body forward to make certain of noticing any change; but, gaze as I might, the vertical black band, despite my impassioned longing, did not give me the intoxicating delight that I should have felt had I seen it changed by a stroke of sudden and significant magic to a luminous bar of gold.  This was indeed a great fuss to make about Albertine, to whom I had not given three minutes' thought during the Guermantes reception!  But, reviving the feelings of anxiety expectancy I had had in the past over other girls, Gilberte especially when she was late in coming, the prospects of having to forgo a simple physical pleasure caused me an intense mental suffering.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 755

Once again we see the peculiarity of desire.  Proust, waiting for Albertine, admits that he had given her precious little thought when he was at the Guermantes reception, but now that he is actually, actively, waiting for her he is consumed by desire and anxiety.  As always, he paints a lovely picture, in this case the anticipated arrival of the golden light which will chase away the darkness.  A "luminous bar of gold" will reward him, and while at that moment he seems more concerned with being paid of in orgasmic coin, it seems quite likely that he'll end up short-changed emotionally.

At the end his waiting is rewarded when the phone rings, but, as is the case with Albertine, it is never as simple as it seems. "I was tortured by the incessant recurrence of my longing, ever more anxious and never gratified, for the sound of a call; having arrived at the culminating point of a tortuous ascent through the coils of my lonely anguish, from the depths of a populous, nocturnal Paris brought miraculously close to me, there beside my bookcase, I suddenly heard, mechanical and sublime, like the fluttering scarf of the shepherd's pipe in Tristan, the top-like whirr of the telephone.  I sprang to the instrument; it was Albertine." (p. 757) I think it's impossible to read the phrase "a populous, nocturnal Paris" without reflecting upon Proust's later days, slowly dying, cutting himself off from that very Paris, only leaving his room in the middle of the night, as he desperately worked to finish this work.  He was a ghost, a part from that "populous, nocturnal Paris."