Cities of the Marcel Proust Plain

The times change. There’s no doubt. Commonplaces, however, remain commonplace every time they are implemented, like a dose of vaccine. Its use, perhaps only once, but certainly on the second occasion, should inoculate and protect its user from ever again suffering from its nauseating worldliness. But such immunity is rarely achieved, especially among those who find simple instructions, such as “stay home” or “avoid clichés, at all costs,” quite impossible to interpret or even remember.

I remember the time, not so long ago, when even the mention of certain sexual habits could only be alluded to in passing, accompanied by blinking, nervous throat clearing, or the deliberate and calculated inclusion of the classic allusion, lest the speaker appear to be contaminated. for such blatantly immoral practices. The inclusion of gender was classically important, here, because these unspoken, unnamed behaviors alluded to habits that remained illegal and reportable among men, while the female equivalent carried a different name, lewdly, and, while not officially tolerated , generally remained beyond. the interest of the law.

But it was not only the classical world, but also the biblical world that provided the means to refer to these despicable but apparently common practices. The Cities of the Plain, Sodom and Gomorrah, suffered divine retribution – at least the experience is recorded as divine – due to the prevalence of these crimes against nature within their walls. In more modern times, we have passed the age when the natural can be criminal, and we have also passed the clichés of vilifying and ridiculing through censorious judgment or humor. For all its use of the theme, the filmed series never included the title Carry on Sodomy, despite the regular use of censorship and ridicule in the almost repeated scripts to elicit laughter from audiences that might elsewhere be judged and scorned.

And so we come to Sodom and Gomorrah, volume four of A La Recherche De Temps Perdu, A Remembrance Of Things Past, or words like that. At the time of this writing, the observation that a significant number of French high society could trace their descent to these cities of the plain would have been shocking. Eyebrows would have been raised, throats cleared, and private laughter hidden behind social condemnation, as the gentlemen conversed on their way to the brothel, where the workers they met did not really count, for it was clearly poverty that forced them to live. behave. Thus. But times change. Now, it is not this discussion of homosexuality that could shock, but the fate of the talkers.

So now, when we read about gay men and women, gays and lesbians, gays and lesbians, we can suffer neither the shock nor the surprise of being exposed to ideas that we now politely ignore in public or condemn only in private. Nor can we almost certainly associate ourselves with the type of society in which the revelations were being made. The lives, and more accurately the attitudes, of these people are now completely foreign to our experience, though they may still exist. The realization reminds us that we regularly admire images in the form of art in galleries, which have as little to do with our own lives as the characters Marcel Proust creates, but because the paintings have nothing audible to say in their own words, we don’t we are able to recognize the cultural abyss of our distance from what they represent.

Times may change, but our propensity to apply false logic persists. Marcel Proust’s observation of doctors is almost contemporary. They usually err on the side of optimism about treatment, pessimism about outcome. “Wine in moderation, it doesn’t hurt, it’s always a tonic… Sexual pleasure? After all, it is a natural function. I allow you to use it, but not to abuse it, you understand. Too much of anything is wrong.” At once, what a temptation for the patient, to give up those two givers of life, water and chastity. He also recognized that at a certain age human beings cease to be individuals and become research projects. I had reached that state of exhaustion in which the body of a sick person becomes a retort in which we study chemical reactions. In our own time, we code this as aging.

But then we can, like the English public schoolboy, develop a personal and internal resistance to propensities that could previously be pursued through physical activity. Several English prime ministers have publicly benefited from the Eton Wall Game while privately they probably remained on the other side of the wall. “Suppose we take a walk in the garden, sir,” I said to Swann, while Count Arnulphe, in a lisping a voice that seems to indicate that, mentally at least, his development was incomplete, he answered M. de Charlus with a naively complacent precision: “I, oh, golf mainly, tennis, football, running, polo I like it very much.” Thus Minerva, being subdivided, ceased to be in certain deities goddess of wisdom, and she embodied part of herself in a purely sporting and horse-loving deity, Athena Hippia. Therefore, we may find that the limitations we place on ourselves are limiting.

At least the Old Etonian prime ministers would have adapted admirably to the classical allusion, and probably still would. Times may change, but we only understand how they have changed when we care to experience the memory of past times and engage with their characters, both larger and ultimately smaller than life.