My Years With Proust - Day 653

Personally, I found it absolutely immaterial from a moral point of view whether one took one's pleasures with a man or with a woman, and only too natural and human that one should take it where one could find it.  If, therefore, Robert had not been married, his liaison with Charlie ought not to have caused me pain. And yet I realised that the pain I felt would have been as acute if Robert had been a bachelor. In anyone else, his conduct would have left me indifferent.  But I wept when I reflected that I had once had so great an affection for a different Saint-Loup, an affection which, I sensed all too clearly from the cold and evasive manner which he now adopted, he no longer felt for me, since men, now that they were capable of arousing his desires, could no longer inspire his friendship. How could these tastes have come to birth in a young man who had loved women so passionately that I had seen him brought to a state of almost suicidal despair because "Rachel when from the Lord' had threatened to leave him? Had the resemblance between Charlie and Rachel - invisible to me - been the plank which had enabled Robert to pass from his father's tastes to those of his uncle, in order to complete the physiological evolution which even in the latter had occurred fairly late?

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, p. 704

Last time we asked the question of whether Robert could no longer be friends with men because he now viewed them as potential sex objects.   Proust appears to answer the question in the affirmative: "But I wept when I reflected that I had once had so great an affection for a different Saint-Loup, an affection which, I sensed all too clearly from the cold and evasive manner which he now adopted, he no longer felt for me, since men, now that they were capable of arousing his desires, could no longer inspire his friendship."  Nevertheless, Marcel still finds is mysterious, especially considering how desperately sad, almost suicidally so, that Robert had grown when Rachel had broken things off with him.  However, as we've discussed, aren't all love affairs about self-love and vanity, and that transcends the shape and function of your naughty bits.

What I find more interesting about this section is Proust's statement that Robert's sexuality means nothing morally.  "Personally, I found it absolutely immaterial from a moral point of view whether one took one's pleasures with a man or with a woman, and only too natural and human that one should take it where one could find it."  It's appropriate that he opens the sentence with the word "personally," because this is just about the most personal statement Proust ever uttered in Remembrance of Things Past.  It's also important to remember that Proust wrote this novel over a century ago, and how progressive, if not revolutionary, that statement was then.  Today it constitutes, or should constitute, the very definition of a "duh" statement, but yet think of how much time and anguish and anger are devoted to this non-issue?