My Year With Proust - Day 351

   I asked Albertine if she would like something to drink.  "I seem to see oranges over there and water," she said.  "That will be perfect."  I was thus able to taste, together with her kisses, that refreshing coolness which had seemed to me to be superior to them at the Princesse de Guermantes's.  And the orange squeezed into the water seemed to yield to me, as I drank, the secret life of its ripening growth, its beneficent action upon certain states of that human body which belongs to so different a kingdom, its powerlessness to make that body live but on the other hand the process of irrigation by which it as able to benefit it - countless - mysteries unveiled by the fruit to my sensory perception, but not at all to my intelligence.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 651

Here's another one of the classic Proustian sections which is remarkably sexually charged without the merest motion of sex.  One minute Albertine is, in response to his request, raining kisses on him, and then the next she is gone.  Starting the next paragraph Proust writes, "When Albertine had gone, I remembered that I had promised Swann that I would write to Gilberte, an courtesy, I felt, demanded that I should do so at once."  Albertine is very quickly forgotten.  Of course, it followed hard on the heels of: "And the orange squeezed into the water seemed to yield to me, as I drank, the secret life of its ripening growth, . . . mystery unveiled by the fruit to my sensory perception, but not at all to my intelligence."  If you've had that much action you definitely need a break.