Pulling a Woody

I have been thinking of Mr. Allen again.

Woody Allen has started filming “Fading Gigolo,” director John Turturro’s movie starring the “Manhattan” director and sexy leading ladies Sofía Vergara, Sharon Stone and Johnny Depp’s ex Vanessa Paradis.

It's interesting, and must be a source of some pain to Mr. Allen, that he is remembered primarily for a movie he considers his worst effort. In any case, he is wrong. Manhattan is by far his best movie. The punchline to the whole story is that he is cast in the Turturro movie as a pimp.

But back to Mr. Allen and his odd moral stature among the new clerisy. The term "new clerisy", which deserves to catch on, comes from a brilliant article by Joel Kotkin and refers to

“new hierarchies of technical elites” that Daniel Bell predicted in 1976 in The Coming Of Post-Industrial Society. For that group, Bell wrote, nature and human nature ceased to be central, as “fewer now handle artifacts or things” so that “reality is primarily the social world”—which, he warned, “gives rise to a new Utopianism” that mistakenly treats human nature as something that can be engineered and corrected by instruction from their enlightened betters. This approach, although often grounded in good intention, can easily morph into a technocratic authoritarianism.

I would add, however, that although this group believes that nature and human nature can be overcome, they also have a tendency to accept fate and a tragic explanation of life.

Consider the classic problem of "falling" in love with one person when you're married to someone else. What do you do about it? The tragic worldview accepts this falling in love as fate. The non-tragic view says you can, with God's help, transcend this. Let's read a little reaction to such a case. The following is Keira Knightly and an interviewer from a piece in Interview magazine giving Newt Gingrich some well-deserved mockery. But the fascinating bit is how Knightly simply cannot see any sort of transcendent forgiveness or justice as anything but a joke:

CRONENBERG: Well, I've heard from Newt Gingrich that open marriages are the thing now.

KNIGHTLEY: That's what Newt Gingrich is saying?

CRONENBERG:Well, apparently his ex-wife says that Newt came to her and said, "I've got this mistress, and I think we should all sort of just accept that this is an open marriage." Of course, he probably wasn't thinking of his wife taking advantage of the privileges of an open marriage, but he thought that it was quite all right for him to have a couple of ladies and that they should both accept it.

KNIGHTLEY: Well, that is a problem. If you're a Republican in America and then you're also sort of shagging anything that moves—I think that's always difficult, isn't it?

CRONENBERG: Except he's got the right-wing Christian out: "I asked god for forgiveness and he said okay." [laughs] If you're a Christian right-wing Republican, then that might make it okay. But the thing is, Newt was the guy who was attacking Bill Clinton for his Monica Lewinsky moment while he himself was having an extramarital affair. So the hypocrisy is rather thick at that point.

KNIGHTLEY: Absolutely extraordinary . . . If only I wasn't an atheist, I could get away with anything. You'd just ask for forgiveness and then you'd be forgiven. It sounds much better than having to live with guilt.

As is so often the case, Knightly doesn't seem to understand the difference between "guilt" and "shame". Guilt is the thing that Gingrich obviously did not have. If he'd been aware of his own guilt he'd have had some regard for human frailty* in others. Knightly neither knows nor cares much about guilt. What she understands is shame and she wants Gingrich to be burdened with tons of it so that he, or anyone who thinks like him for that matter, will be unelectable. She wants to drive him out of polite society.

The important difference between the two is this: guilt is something you would feel even if you weren't caught. If Gingrich or Clinton were the sort of men capable of feeling guilt they would have been torn by it long before their behaviour was exposed. Shame is something that is only felt at the thought of the greater society you live in knowing and condemning what you have done.

You can, of course, have anticipatory shame. That is you could have cheated on your spouse and have gotten away with it but be constantly dreading the shame would come with getting caught. Someone in such a situation will be motivated to keep their behaviour a secret but will not be motivated to atone for or ask forgiveness for what they have done. They might wish they had not done what they did in the fate of possible exposure but the practical effect is that they are only motivated to try even harder to avoid getting caught.

In two Woody Allen films, Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point a man who finds himself in the position of desperately needing to avoid shame for an affair actually murders the woman he was having an affair with in order to keep what he has done a secret. And then he is racked with "guilt". For a while. Eventually this anticipatory shame that Allen mistakes for guilt goes away. The following is Woody Allen musing about it all in two parts, part one:

I feel that is true—that one can commit a crime, do unspeakable things, and get away with it. There are people who commit all sorts of crimes and get away with it, and some of them are plagued with all sorts of guilt for the rest of their lives and others aren’t. They commit terrible crimes and they have wonderful lives, wonderful, happy lives, with families and children, and they have done unspeakably terrible things. There is no justice, there is no rational structure to it. That is just the way it is, and each person figures out some way to cope….

This is obviously deeper than Keira Knightly (not a tall order, Barbie dolls are deeper than Keira Knightly). But while Allen has obviously thought of it longer, notice that he, like she, can only think of guilt and/or shame as a negative thing that needs to be made to go away. It's sort of like acne: "If I could get rid of these pimples then I could get girls to put out and I'd be happier". The guilt (which is really anticipatory shame) is something that stands in between me and a comfortable, easy life.

One gets the feeling that neither Knightly nor Allen appreciate the degree to which their elite stature in our society is a result of either colossal fluke or the workings of grace. In some abstract sense they get it but they clearly go through life comfortable with their elite status and privileges. It doesn't trouble them to think that millions of other people couldn't dream of such a thing and millions more suffer in ways that neither of them could bear every day and yet manage to "cope" better than they do.

Here is part two of Allen's musings:

Some people cope better than others. I was with Billy Graham once, and he said that even if it turned out in the end that there is no God and the universe is empty, he would still have had a better life than me. I understand that. If you can delude yourself by believing that there is some kind of Santa Claus out there who is going to bail you out in the end, then it will help you get through. Even if you are proven wrong in the end, you would have had a better life.

Again, notice that Allen only sees faith as a way of getting bailed out in the end. Even the views he projects onto religious believers are antinomian; it's always about avoiding suffering for your moral failings. There are of course, brands of protestantism that are antinomian and even some Catholics like Newt Gingrich who behave as if they think that their religion gives them a get of jail free card, but Allen never confronts the choice to believe in a God who is a source of justice; a God who might well, almost certainly will for most of us, cause us to suffer for our sins and, further, weird as this may seem, would do so because he loves us.

The Woody Allen interview I cite here ends with a discussion of Shane and Allen says the following about the character.

I didn’t see him as a martyred figure, a persecuted figure. I saw him as quite a heroic figure who does a job that needs to be done, a practical matter. I saw him as a practical secular character. In this world there are just some people who need killing and that is just the way it is. It sounds terrible, but there is no other way to get around that, and most of us are not up to doing it, incapable for moral reasons or physically not up to it. And Shane is a person who saw what had to be done and went out and did it. He had the skill to do it, and that’s the way I feel about the world: there are certain problems that can only be dealt with that way. As ugly a truth as that is, I do think it’s the truth about the world.

Now I don't think Allen understands Shane at all but I want you to feel the full chill of what he says here: " In this world there are just some people who need killing and that is just the way it is". Now that might seem acceptable in the limited context of the movie Shane where the men the hero kills are a corrupt cattle baron and a professional killer who are threatening to kill innocent people to get there way. But in this interview, the whole issue arose because of a discussion of Allen's in which a man has his mistress killed because she threatens his ordered, married life. That is the larger context of "some people just need killing".

In conclusion, notice how bourgeois Woody Allen is. He isn't the sort of guy who'd actually take a hit out on his mistress (Crimes and Misdemeanors) or kill her directly (Match Point). No, he's the sort of guy who'd sit at home imagining such a thing and could convince himself that it's all okay at a certain distance, just so long as none of it rubs off on him. That would be intolerable because it would be shameful.

* I've shamelessly swiped the construction "some regard for human frailty" from The Philadelphia Story:

Tracy: You seem quite contemptuous of me all of a sudden.

Dexter: No, Red, not of you, never of you. Red, you could be the finest woman on this earth. I'm contemptuous of something inside of you you either can't help, or make no attempt to; your so-called 'strength' - your prejudice against weakness - your blank intolerance.

Tracy: Is that all?

Dexter: That's the gist of it; because you'll never be a first-class human being or a first-class woman, until you've learned to have some regard for human frailty. It's a pity your own foot can't slip a little sometime - but your sense of inner divinity wouldn't allow that. This goddess must and shall remain intact. There are more of you than people realize - a special class of the American Female. The Married Maidens.

Tracy Samantha Lord's foot does slip of course and she learns something from it. When Woody Allen's foot slips, he, with the help of his analyst, convinces himself that he just needs the bad feeling to go away so he can live a comfortable, bourgeois life. That is the personal morality of the new clerisy. It's a personal morality in the sense that that is what they apply to themselves; they wouldn't let anyone they disapproved of get away with it.

Elmo and the gutter press

UPDATE: Elmo's accuser has recanted. I would guess that there was some sort of lover's tiff at the base of this—most likely that the accuser was dumped and retaliated with this story. We'll never know. That does not, I believe, invalidate anything that follows.

What is it about Elmo the Muppet and sex? Do you remember the Tickle Me Elmo craze? I'm sure you remember the year parents paid outrageous sums to get the doll but do you remember the Elmo sex craze? There was one in the mid-to-late 1990s. Young women have decorated their adult beds with childish toys since time immemorial but there was something different about Elmo. Most such plush toys get pushed aside when more adult activities took place but for some reason it became a big thing for a woman to to do outrageous things with her Elmo while naked. Put him in between her breasts or upper thighs and squeezed until he'd made his famous sound for example. When between the upper-upper thighs, the reaction after the third squeeze was particularly stimulating for all involved.


Fortunately for Elmo all this happened before the craze of girls willing putting up incriminating photos and video of themselves on the Internet really took off. But now it looks like Elmo's lucky streak has run out:

It’s not a sunny day on “Sesame Street,” as the show revealed Monday that the puppeteer behind Elmo has been accused of having a sexual relationship with an underage boy.

That's the New York Daily News, God bless them. People who hate the gutter press imagine that it's easy to do what papers like the Daily News do but it isn't. That is brilliant writing. The New York Times writers and editors couldn't do that.

But it's not just what they write, it's also the stuff they have the good sense to let you figure out for yourself. For the puppeteer in question will now be leaving the show even though the people who make the show claim he has been vindicated!

“We took the allegation very seriously and took immediate action,” Sesame Workshop said in the statement. “We met with the accuser twice and had repeated communications with him. We met with Kevin, who denied the accusation. We also conducted a thorough investigation and found the allegation of underage conduct to be unsubstantiated.” 

But he is till off the show:

 “Although this was a personal relationship unrelated to the workplace, our investigation did reveal that Kevin exercised poor judgment and violated company policy regarding internet usage and he was disciplined,” Sesame Workshop said.

In light of the incident, Clash will be moving away from Sesame Street for the foreseeable future.

“Kevin insists that the allegation of underage conduct is false and defamatory and he is taking actions to protect his reputation,” the Workshop noted. “We have granted him a leave of absence to do so.”

No doubt Stalin liked to insist that he'd "granted Trotsky a leave of absence" too. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall at the meetings where the exact terms of Kevin Clash's departure were negotiated.

But here is the thing, the news story doesn't tell us anywhere the real reason Kevin Clash is leaving the show nor does it tell us the simple truth that Kevin Clash cannot protect his reputation because it is now irredeemably trashed.

Here are the two most important facts in the story:

1. This was a same-sex relationship. You can pretend all you want but society isn't fully accepting of homosexuality and it never will be. The most gay men can hope for is tolerance and tolerance always comes with limits, which brings us to the second crucial fact.
2. Kevin Clash is 52 and his accuser is 23 and the relationship seems to have started a number of years ago. 

Presumably the evidence suggests it did not start more than six years ago because the Sesame Workshop say they found no evidence of an underage affair. On the other hand, it must have started at least long enough ago that his accuser feels the claim was credible.

We can start to wonder can't we? But I want to focus on the writing style because there is something about this gutter style journalism that makes for great writing. Not in Proust, even though the relationship Clash had here is very much like one that Charlus has in The Novel. He never had the knack for this sort of touch.

But Evelyn Waugh sure did. Notice in the following how he never tells us what makes the scoutmaster naughty or what the instrument was being used for* and how that makes this writing so powerful.

"Oh dear, it's very difficult being a Catholic."

"Does it make much difference to you?"

"Of course. All the time."

"Well, I can't say I've noticed it. Are you struggling against temptation? You don't seem much more virtuous than me."

"I'm very, very much wickeder," said Sebastian indignantly.

"Well then?"

"Who was it used to pray, 'O God, make me good, but not yet?'"

"I don't know. You, I should think."

"Why, yes I do, every day. But it isn't that." He turned back to the pages of the News of the World and said, "Another naughty scout-master."

"I suppose they try to make you believe an awful lot of nonsense?"

"Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me."

"But my dear Sebastian, you can't seriously believe it all."

"Can't I?"

"I mean about Christmas and the star and the three knights and the ox and the ass."

"Oh yes, I believe that. It's a lovely idea."

"But you can't believe things because they're a lovely idea."

"But I do. That's how I believe."

"And in prayers? Do you think you can kneel down in front of a statue and say a few words, not even out loud, just in your mind, and change the weather; or that some saints are more influential than others, and you must get hold of the right one to help you on the right problem?"

"Oh yes. Don't you remember last term when I took Aloysius and left him behind I didn't know where. I prayed like mad to St Anthony of Padua that morning, and immediately after lunch there was Mr Nicholas at Canterbury Gate with Aloysius in his arms, saying I'd left him in his cab."

"Well," I said. "If you can believe all that and you don't want to be good, where's the difficulty about your religion?"

"If you can't see, you can't."

"Well, where?"

"Oh, don't be a bore, Charles. I want to read about a woman in Hull who's been using an instrument. Thirty-eight other cases were taken into consideration in sentencing her to six months – golly!"

As I write this, a married public official has had to resign because of an affair he was having. The interesting thing about it, from our perspective, is that he was found out when the woman he was having the affair with started sending harassing e-mails to people she considered his enemies. Think of how stupid that was! But for her, in love, it probably felt just fine. The power of erotic love is such that we all feel like we live in some protected sphere of inviolable purity when we are basking in Eros' lap.

The point of the above is not just that sin is banal but also that it only can be so because we are so unaware of ourselves as sinners. And thus a woman having an extramarital affair harasses others for what she believes to be there sins and Sebastian, who claims to be aware of his own wickedness, delights in that of scoutmasters.

A bonus point for Catholics: Notice the point Waugh makes here about human nature and its fallibility. Waugh thinks sexual sins are not something other people do but something we do. That is an important issue given the nature of the relationship between Sebastian and Charles. That is an aspect of Waugh a lot of Catholics have a hard time swallowing.

 And not just Catholics. The modern secular view is that the sexual relationship between Sebastian and Charles is just fine and should be accepted if not glorified. Proust couldn't bring himself to say such a thing and perhaps couldn't even quite believe it himself but he sees love differently. One of the odd outcomes of this, as Waugh himself seems to have realized, is that it was much easier for Waugh to create gay characters who were happy and well-adjusted than it was for a writer like Proust.

And we cannot say that that is because Proust really knew what it was like to have a loving sexual relationship with another man and Waugh did not. If anything, the reverse was the case.


* For those who didn't know, the instrument was used to induce abortions.

A little light culture: The Power of Love

Here folks, is what six million pounds will buy you:


(If that embedding doesn't work, you can also watch it here.) I'll be honest,  I don't think they got their money's worth. They should have spent less on production and  more on the script.

That said, let's stop and think about what is going on here. I know, it's tempting to brush it off by saying, "Cheap emotional manipulation, that's what is going on."And it is. Any grade Grade 6 class in the land could come up with something like this.

The power of love
A force from above
Cleaning my soul
The power of love
A force from above
A sky-scraping dove

Flame on burn desire
Love with tongues of fire
Purge the soul
Make love your goal

But here is the thing, it works. You may say, "It didn't work on me," but that will only be because you saw it coming and chose to put up barriers. This sort of stuff will always work on some and, even if you choose to be cynical, one day something like this will catch you off guard and you'll be swept away by it. And then you'll be a little bit embarrassed because you won't be able to explain it to anyone else. They might laugh at you.

The song is old enough now that you may never have heard it. The original was by a group called Frankie Goes to Hollywood who had very, very brief fame in the mid-1980s. Their biggest success is the song "Relax" which has been aptly described as instructions for how to do anal sex. Yes, really. You can see it here if you want. By contrast, the original of "The Power of Love" video featured a Christmas Nativity theme played absolutely, if you'll pardon the expression, straight.

This is only one of a number of songs called "The Power of Love" and it isn't the crassest by a long stretch. That honour goes to a song by that name by Jennifer Rush. Most people will be more familiar with the version by Celine Dion. It's much loved and DJs at weddings get asked to play it for the couples first dance all the time.

It's a song about a girl losing her virginity. No, I am not making that up. Read the lyrics and weep. The key moment begins at 2:49.





Actually, "losing her virginity" is too kind. It's really a song about a girl putting out for the first time and I put it that way because we know this won't the last guy she puts out for.

I love the line, "Whenever you reach for me, I'll do all that I can," because it's such a transparent lie. Yeah, Saturday morning when you feel like sleeping in and you're mad at me because of something I said that embarrassed you in front of all your friends last night and, besides, you have a headache and you're not in the mood, but you'll do all that you can just because I reach for you? There isn't a pick up artist anywhere on the planet, crass, cheap or unoriginal enough to spring a line like any of the lyrics of this song on a girl and yet millions of women bought this single and ate that steaming pile of horseshit up like it was chocolate pudding.

It's a funny contrast. Here is what the guy who wore leather, did poppers and had sex so casual it was anonymous says about the power of love:

I always felt like The Power Of Love was the record that would save me in this life. There is a biblical aspect to its spirituality and passion; the fact that love is the only thing that matters in the end.

Here is the climax of the Jennifer Rush song:

The sound of your heart beating
Made it clear
Suddenly the feeling that I can't go on
Is light years away 

Who ya gonna choose?

I think the key question is that if you really believe that love is the only thing that matters in the end, you also want to ask, "Whose love?" and, on that point, I'm going with Jesus myself.

The Tristan Chord

A little heavy culture and a heavy chord. It's the notes F-B-D#-G# played together. It appears in Tristan and Isolde. It is much discussed.

If you take the hype seriously, the thing about the chord is that it leaves you utterly confused as to what key you are in. Here is the thing, though, it was used in music before Wagner did it without raising any hype at all. So why did this particular use of the chord cause such excitement?

The short answer is because of the duration and emphasis it receives.

A little more theory. There are a lot of pieces of music that are not at all bewildering to the ear that have some truly wonky chords hiding in them. These chords generally occur in between other familiar and solid sounding chords. The music is going from one chord that is as solid and familiar as an old barn to another one as comfy and cozy as afternoon tea. But barns and teas, however comfortable they may be by themselves, rarely appear side by side. So to get you from one to another, the author of the piece has inserted some harmonic moves that all by themselves would be a little disturbing.

And the music comes down with emphasis on the comfortable barn and tea chords and not on the wonky transition harmony so you barely notice it. The emphasis is on what is solid and the more jarring chords are not accented or prolonged.

But what if you did it the other way around and emphasized the wonky transitions? Well, then you'd have something like what Wagner did. And your audience would be left uncertain as to where exactly the music was coming from or where it was going.

It seems to me that there is a lesson here about living a virtuous life. There are parts of your persona that are like solid, comfortable chords. They send clear and easy to understand messages to everyone about who you are and where you are going. And then there are the things you do to smooth out the connections, to get through the night and so forth, especially the and so forth.

It seems to me that the proper thing is not to emphasize these things. Let them do their business of making connections but don't emphasize them so the whole world knows.

Moralists will immediately object that this is just the usual hypocrites papering over of things. And, yes it is. Furthermore, if you think you can get through life without any odd harmonic moves to back you up, then you should just go right ahead and never be a hypocrites. I'll be the first to take my hat off to you.

More election followup

I think this commentary at National Review Online is very perceptive:

Yet here is something that’s pretty clear, even as the dust settles. Men would have elected Gov. Romney President by a wide margin. Women, who cast about 53 percent of the votes, gave President Obama about a ten-point margin and another four years in the White House.

This should be a wakeup call for everyone on the Right. I count myself among those who assumed — clearly wrongly in hindsight — that the “War on Women” rhetoric wouldn’t work. From my perspective, the Democrats’ campaign for women was flatly insulting, treating women as sex objects (appealing to them to vote with their “lady parts”) and helpless wards of the state (Julia). The charge that Republicans want to restricted access to contraception — that is, beyond returning to the pre-ObamaCare status quo when religious organizations were not forced to pay for others’ contraception — is so far-fetched that it’s almost hard to know how to counter, since just engaging in the discussion grants the question a legitimacy it doesn’t deserve.

That is written by Carrie Lukas and I will cheerfully admit that Ms. Lukas's name and this comment is the sum total of what I know about her. There is a lot that should be said here.

But first let me say something a little impertinent. Lukas says the Democrat campaign treated women as sex objects and that is true. But do you know who else treats women as sex objects? Women do. A woman who puts on skin-tight leggings, a push up bra and a cleavage revealing shirt thinks of herself as a sex object. And that is only the extreme example. The woman who dresses in an elegant and sophisticated manner is also flaunting herself as a sex object. That's not all she thinks of herself as but it is part of it.

And, as I I keep repeating here, the more freedoms and rights a nation gives to women, the more they dress as sex objects. Both on the right and the left there are a lot of people who have a hard time dealing with this. They keep trying to convince themselves that women are being pressured into this, and us, that they shouldn't trust their own lyin' eyes but the truth is plain for anyone who walks out the door and looks around.

Again, as I have said here before, women tend to value sexual status at least as much as sex itself but they do like sex and most of them like it a lot. Sex is not a risk free activity for them, and they typically pay a higher emotional price for it than men do. And then there is this central fact:

Women get pregnant.

Go make like Bart Simpson and write that 100 times on the blackboard before you go home from school today. Men and women are different from one another and that fact goes a long, long way to explain the differences.

Lukas says that the notion that Republicans want to restrict access to contraception is "far-fetched". Well, it depends how you understand the language you are hearing. As I said in last night's post, a lot of women hear the words of those who would deny abortion even in case of rape a desire to take away from them the right to have sex and not to have babies. That may seem far fetched but if any woman who takes a close look at Catholic moral teaching regard sex will find language about every sex act being open to conception that will justify her paranoia. An awful lot of women heard that talk and they skipped right past the legal distinctions and they heard an intent. They heard an intent to force them to be open to pregnancies they don't want.

And see this as a right. They understand perfectly that the Catholic church has a right to teach that the use of contraception is wrong but they also think that any woman, ANY woman, working for ANY employer should have the same access to contraception as every other woman. If any employers are to pay for contraception, they reason, then the Catholic hospital should as well.

I'm just describing here. I'm not saying that is the way it should be but it is the way it is and if last night proved anything, it proved that the culture war is over. I don't know what the losers do at this point. There are a lot of them, far too many to expect them to load up their wagons and slink away to exile in the wilderness.

Sorta political: Election analysis

I write this at 11:12 local time. None of the swing states have been called yet but I think it's over and Romney loses and I'm going to bed now..

What's it mean? I think it means the culture war is over and conservatives lost it. The biggest losing point for the right now is sex and the conservative Catholic-Evangelical alliance is like an anti-sex albatross around the neck of the Republican party. No matter how many votes these people pull in, they will always alienate more.

I know, I know, cultural conservatives don't think they are anti-sex but that is because their understanding of sexual issues is so far from what the rest of the world means that they aren't talking the same language anymore. No matter what cultural conservatives say, most others hear a plan to deny them their sexual freedoms.

ADDED: To put it in one sentence: Women don't want to have babies that they don't want to have. You can parse the question as much as you like but the basic fact of Catholic sexual ethics is that Catholics want to take away the ability to decide these things from women. Look, I'm anti-abortion myself but when Akin and Mourdock and then others said what they said, almost all the women I know started hoping for a Romney defeat.

And I live in Canada!!!

And let's not even get into birth control.

The cultural conservatives also hamper any sort of libertarian case. I don't know that a libertarian argument could succeed in any case but it definitely can't succeed so long as the conservative Catholic-Evangelical alliance is stirring up the pot. For starters, Catholics just don't understand economics and they don't understand economics because they won't abandon their paternalistic notions.

Last question for tonight: Is this a good thing? I don't know. There are some upsides and there some downsides. I suspect the downside is probably a lot steeper than anyone guesses but even if it is, things probably aren't as bad as they might be. They usually aren't. Usually.

How do I feel? I'd like to see greater individual liberty and more freemarket policies along with a scaling back of entitlements. The chances of those things happening just got to be even more remote than they already were. That said, they already were a very, very long shot.

This is the theme song for the day:

Proust: More love

Here is a passage to ponder:

If we believed that the eyes of such a girl were nothing but shiny little discs of mica, we would not be eager to enter her life and link it to our own. But we are well aware that whatever it is that shines in those reflective discs is not reducible to their material composition; that flitting behind them are the black incognizable shadows of the ideas she forms and the people and places she knows ... the dimness of the house into which she will disappear, her own impenetrable projects and the designs of others upon her; and that what we are most aware of is that she herself lies behind them with her desires, her likes and dislikes, the power of her inscrutable and inexhaustible will. I knew I could never possess the young cyclist, unless I could also possess what lay behind her eyes.

There is a sense that all that makes sense. We could read it in certain moods and think, I recognize that sentiment.

It also seems to me that much of it is slightly unhinged. Notice how he starts with expressions such as "enter her life" and "link it to our own" but ends with a desire to penetrate the "impenetrable" and "possess" her. Again, we might think ordinary male attitudes towards love. But how much can these be justified? Especially the second?

And note that there is something here that simply isn't true. We can tell what other people are thinking and feeling from looking at them. No, we can't do it perfectly and we can't actually read minds. But much of the time, we can read people's intentions and feelings towards us from their facial expressions. Well, most of us. There are people who cannot.

The sense in which all the above is most credible is if we imagine these as the thoughts of an adolescent boy.

It is well, well, into the volume entitled A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs that the five girls whom young Marcel finds himself in the shade of make their appearance*. In some ways they are more boy-like than girl-like but I think any heterosexual male can identify with this thought of young Marcel's when he tells us the various things he thought about the girls:

Certainly, in none of my conjectures did I entertain the possibility that they might be chaste.

Not because it is impossible to imagine women as chaste but you tend not to when you are sexually attracted to them.  

Which leads to odd tensions. You sit down and have a pleasant conversation about Proust with the woman you just a few hours ago were imagining what it would be like to dribble chocolate sauce on her nipples, which you have never seen, and watch it form little dark  streams down over her white, white breasts. And you wonder, "Does she know what sort of things I think of her?" and "Would she be pleased or horrified?" All the while you keep up the pretense.

Now, the normal course of events is that you meet a woman and the two of you get closer and slower and get a better and better understanding of your thoughts about one another. She doesn't know about the chocolate precisely but she knows you and gets a good notion of how you are likely to have thought about her and you get a better understanding of her and how she is likely to respond to being told that you have thought such things. And away you go.

But in adolescence such things seem impossible. Girls are older and more knowing than you and, at the same time, your thoughts of them seem so over the top that you cannot imagine connecting.

What sort of world was the one from which she was looking at me? I could not tell, any more than one could tell from the few details which a telescope enables us to descry on a neighbouring planet whether it is inhabited by human beings, whether or not they can see us, or whether their review of us has inspired any reflections in them.

Naturally, you are attracted to girls but, equally naturally, girls whose outward behaviour is a little more vulgar and openly sexual, and who perhaps belong to a new and rising class not so beholden to all the manners and mires that make direct expression between boys and girls more difficult. And thus the five girls who come down the beach at Balbec.





* Why does this second volume take so long to get to the point? Why make your reader beat his way hundreds of pages in, more than 60 percent of the text, before justifying your title? The answer to that, I think, is that the first volume was self-published and Proust was limited in the number of pages he could print. As a consequence, he cut the third section of volume 1 way down. When he found an actual publisher to print volume 2, he revisited at the beginning the stuff he would have liked to have put in Volume1.

I know this is heresy, but I rather wish he hadn't. I think Proust needed an editor and there isn't a single volume of the novel that couldn't have been cut quite a bit and thereby have been made even better.