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.