My Years With Proust - Day 392

   Another incident focused my preoccupations even more in the direction of Gomorrah.  I had noticed on the beach a handsome young woman, slender and pale, whose eyes, round their centre, scattered rays so geometrically luminous that one was reminded, on meeting her gaze, of some constellation.  I thought how much more beautiful she was than Albertine, and how much wiser it would be to give up the other.  But the face of this beautiful young woman had been scoured by the invisible plane of a thoroughly depraved life, of the constant acceptance of vulgar expedients, so much so that her eyes, though nobles than the rest of her face, could radiate nothing but appetites and desires.  On the following day, this young woman being seated a long way away from us in the Casino, I saw that she never ceased to fasten upon Albertine the alternating and revolving beam of her gaze.  It was as though she were making signals to her with a lamp.  It pained me that Albertine should see that she was being so closely observed, and I was afraid that these incessantly rekindled glances might be the agreed signal for an amorous assignation next day.  For all I knew, this assignation might not be the first.  The young woman with the flashing eyes might have come another year to Balbec.  It was perhaps because Albertine had already yielded to her desires, or to those of a friend, that this woman allowed herself to address to her those flashing signals.  If so, they were doing more than demand something for the present; they invoked a justification for it in pleasant hours in the past.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 880

Marcel grows more and more jealous, and more and more fixated on Albertine's sexuality.  Here he paints a picture of a young woman, beautiful, "much more beautiful than Albertine," but one who who possessed a face that "had been scoured by the invisible plane of a thoroughly depraved life."  He convinces himself that this woman is focused on Albertine and exchanging glances that promoted a signal, doubtless agreed upon, "for an amorous assignation next day."  That is, of course, if they haven't had already met to make love countless other times.  We've talked so often about the brain's ability, essentially uncontrollable, to create a narrative, since that part of the brain never sleeps.  What amazes me is how, at least in the waking world and especially with women with love, the narrative we weave is never a positive one.  We can't find her and immediately our constructs a sweaty assignation with someone younger, thinner and more successful than we are.  Our brains, who I think we all know our not our friends, never construct a narrative wherein our loved ones is donating at the food bank.