Meeting Gilberte

Suddenly I stood still, unable to move, as happens when we are faced with a vision that appeals not to our eyes only but requires a deeper kind of perception and takes possession of the whole of our being.


This is when our intrepid narrator first lays eyes on the first (of a series) of girls/women about whom he will obsess, obsessively. Maybe it's just me, but I don't find Proust's descriptions of his emotional state regarding women to ring true. I find them fascinating, don't get me wrong. But he doesn't too often sound like a boy (or a man) in love with a girl (or a woman). And I'm not just talking about his homosexuality; it's more his strange outsider-ness at work. His was an idiosyncratic psyche. He saw and felt differently than the people around him. As became apparent in this book a long time ago, and we're only at page 153.

Mysterious longing

And then I returned to the hawthorns, and stood before them as one stands before those masterpieces which, one imagines, one will be better able to "take in" when one has looked away for a moment at something else; but in vain did I make a screen with my hands, the better to concentrate upon the flowers, the feeling they aroused in me remained obscure and vague, struggling and failing to free itself, to float across and become one with them. They themselves offered me no enlightenment, and I could not call upon any other flowers to satisfy this mysterious longing.


The man's on a roll. This is right on the heels of the last entry, and he's still trying to unpack the unearthly allure of those hawthorns. This passage may nearly serve as a microcosm of the entire 4,200-some-odd-page affair: the narrator observing, lacking quite the words to describe but trying (at great length) anyway, intermittently focusing on small episodes, but no, everything still floats away in a wordy blur of emotion, and he (and we) are left, in the end, with nothing more (or less) than Mysterious Longing.