My Year With Proust - Day 365

And once, unable any longer to hold out against my desire, instead of going back to bed I put on my clothes and set off for Incarville to find Albertine. . . .

. . . Hurrying past the glittering house of "pleasure," insolently erected there despite the protests which the heads of families had addressed in vain to the mayor, I reached the cliff and followed its winding paths in the direction of Balbec.  I heard, without responding to it, the appeal of the hawthorns.  Less opulent neighbours of the blossoming apple trees, they found them rather heavy, without denying the fresh complexion of the rosy-petalled daughters of those wealthy brewers of cider.  They knew that, though less well endowed, they were more sought after, and more than attractive enough simply in their crumpled whiteness.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 812-813

Proust continues to break out of his sorrowful lethargy.  As we saw yesterday, part of it simply relates to desire.  However, there is desire and there is desire, and this is Proust, so part of that reawakening of desire relates to beauty.  As I'm reading Remembrance of Things Past I often, I would argue quite naturally reflect back on The Tale of Genji, and not simply because of its seemingly interminable length and love of detail.  Like Proust, no matter what Murasaki is having her characters do, there is always time to stop and discourse on the beauty of nature and the nature of beauty; they are both magnetically drawn to beauty.  The difference is that Genji, or countless other characters from the novel, will immortalize these observations in a poem (which is usually then answered by another poem).  Genji reflects:

The memories of long love
gather like drifting snow
poignant as the mandarin ducks
who float side by side in sleep

To me, it reads like a poetic version of Proust.  Oh hell, now I need to go reread The Tale of Genji.  I clearly need to live longer than I had planned.