My Years With Proust - Day 711

   And far from thinking myself wretched - a belief which some of the greatest men have held - because of this life without friends or familiar talk that I should live, I realised that our powers of exaltation are being give a false direction when we expend them in friendship, because they are then diverted from those truths towards which they might have guided us to aim at a particular friendship which can lead to nothing. Still, intervals of rest and society would at times be necessary to me and then, I felt, rather than those intellectual conversations which fashionable people suppose must be useful to writers, a little amorous dalliance with young girls in bloom would be the choice nutriment with which, if with anything, I might indulge my imagination, like the famous horse that was fed on nothing but roses.  What suddenly I yearned for once more was what I had dreamed of at Balbec, when, still strangers to me, I had seen Albertine and Andree and their friends pass across the background of the sea.  But alas! I could no longer hope to find again those particular girls for whom at this moment my desire was so strong.  The action of the years had transformed all the individuals whom I had seen to-day, and among them Gilberte herself, had assuredly transformed those of the girls of Balbec who survived, as it would have transformed Albertine had she not been killed, into women too sadly different from what I remembered.  And it hurt me to think that I was obliged to look for them within myself, since Time which changes human beings does not alter the image which we have preserved of them.  Indeed nothing is more painful than this contrast between the mutability of people and the fixity of memory.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 1036

"Still, intervals of rest and society would at times be necessary to me and then, I felt, rather than those intellectual conversations which fashionable people suppose must be useful to writers, a little amorous dalliance with young girls in bloom would be the choice nutriment with which, if with anything, I might indulge my imagination, like the famous horse that was fed on nothing but roses."  I know there are profound things going on in this passage, but on my first reading I couldn't get past the line about "a little amorous dalliance with girls in bloom," so much so that I actually sent it on to my excellent friend Mike Kelly (who I routinely exchange reflections about literature, much as I do with Erik Esckilsen about movies).  I think it's far more than a throwaway line because I think it cuts right to Marcel's fascination with Albertine.  She represents youth and purity and innocence, and, well, health and freedom, to a Proust whose life was shrinking around him.  In the larger metaphorical sense for all writers, I think she symbolizes life and the need to live it.