My Years With Proust - Day 366

   I had no wish to remain there by myself.  It was barely four o'clock.  I asked Francoise to go and find Albertine, so that she might spend the evening with me.

   It would be untrue, I think, to say that there were already symptoms of that painful and perpetual mistrust which Albetine was to inspire in me, not the mention the special character, emphatically Gomorrhan, which that mistrust was to assume.  Certainly, even that afternoon - but not for the first time - I waited a little anxiously.  Francoise, once she had started, stayed away so long that I began to despair.  I had not light the lamp.  The daylight had almost gone.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 815

First off, I suppose I should recognize the fact that Proust has won, and it's taken me over a year to read and comment on Remembrance of Things Past.  Well, I guess we already knew that if you look back at the dates of the posts, but now I'm proposing that we're officially into year two by changing the title of the daily posts from "My Year With Proust" to "My Years With Proust."  So, Proust has won, but, obviously, so have I.  This project has more than paid for itself with a treasury of intellectual and emotional coinage.  Essentially, I feel that by taking this approach I've learned a hell of a lot about Remembrance of Things Past, but maybe even more about myself.  Oh, and since I'm only in the latter stages of the fourth volume - out of seven total - the bigger question might be whether or not I slide into a third year of reading Proust.

Proust is hinting at a couple things, first his own jealousy, which he has so far denied (and, as I've pointed out in previous posts, I think he turns a blind eye to).  Secondly, he adds a specific aspect to his jealousy, Albertine's Gomorrhan nature.  For the first time he addresses the notion that Albertine is a lesbian, or maybe more appropriately in this case, bi-sexual - although we'll have to see how it plays itself out.  Now, I knew that Albertine was a lesbian, but that mainly relates to that I am a person living in the world, and this is something that people living in the world know; it's one of those odd instances of cultural osmosis, where a cultural artifact is something that I know, but where it came from is beyond me.  That said, I think this is the first time that it is referenced in the novel.  There will be much more to come on this front, obviously.