My Years With Proust - Day 417

By a transposition of the senses, M. de Cambremer looked at you with his nose.  This nose of his was not ugly; it was if anything too handsome, too bold, too proud of its own importance.  Arched, polished, gleaming, brand-new, it was amply prepared to make up for the spiritual inadequacy of the eyes.  Unfortunately, if the eyes are sometimes the organ through which our intelligence is revealed, the nose (whatever the intimate solidarity and the unsuspected repercussion of one feature on another), the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 943

As often noted, I pull out passages from Remembrance of Things Past for any number of reasons, ranging from the sublime to the silly.  Sadly, I think this one is representative of the latter, and it has cursed me in that I'll be looking at people's noses and determining the truth of Proust's words.  However, it also got me thinking of the peculiarity of cultural aesthetics and sexual desire.  People will often talk about the eyes or the cheek bones or the mouth, both in regards to beauty and also outright desire.  Even the ears sometimes get attributed.  When Haruki Murakami is not having his characters descend into wells, he will often have them notice the beauty of a woman's ears (surely there is some psychological link here that has formed the basis of a scholarly paper).  However, the nose never seems to carry the same sway.  That said, if I did a Google search for nose porn I'm sure I'd find something, as there is no obscure aspect of human depravity which the Internet doesn't service.  Of course, thanks to the GOP my search history is now for sale so it would doubtless come back to haunt me. Or it would come back to haunt a younger man.  I suppose there is some advantage to being at the end of one's career.  When you have few professional aspirations left I guess you're free of the professional (if not the carnal) whirlwind.