Proust died in 1922, so he never saw the Second World War. But he did write prophetically about the mentality of war: “They have long ceased to speculate upon the morality or immorality of the life they led, because it was the life that was led by everyone round them. So it is that, when we study certain periods of ancient history, we are astonished to see men and women individually good participate without scruple in mass assassinations or human sacrifices which probably seemed to them natural things. And our own age, no doubt, when its history is read two thousand years hence, will seem to an equal degree to have bathed men of pure and tender conscience in a vital element which will strike the future reader as monstrously pernicious but to which at the time these men adapted themselves without difficulty.”

Robert Saint Loop dies in WWI. Proust reminisces about Robert’s “vice” (homosexuality) and wonders if perhaps Robert exaggerated its seriousness, “just as children who make love for the first time, or merely before that age seek solitary pleasure, imagine themselves to be like a plant which cannot scatter its pollen without dying immediately afterwards?” “Perhaps this exaggeration … came partly from the still unfamiliar idea of sin, partly from the fact that an entirely novel sensation has an almost terrible force which later will gradually diminish.”

I was a very naïve kid. Until the age of 16 I had no idea what an orgasm was. I discovered on my own, seeking “solitary pleasure” in my room. I’ve always been interested in the discovery of sex. I mean, I’ve often been intrigued by this question. Imagine that a boy and a girl are left on a deserted island as children, and have no information from others about their bodies and how sex and procreation “work.” Of course they’d figure it out, but watching the process would be interesting. Pleasure leads the way.

So there I am in my room enjoying my hard-on, stroking and pulling at it impulsively just because it feels good. More intense stroking, and greater pleasure. And then, suddenly, a rapid escalation which I couldn’t stop. I erupt, releasing semen all over my hand and chair. I was shocked. I had no idea this was what happened. I knew, of course, that this must be an orgasm, and that it was the same sort of thing that I’d experienced dozens of times in my sleep, when I’d been wakened by a wonderful sensation--a messy and embarrassing thing that I had little control over and which I wished I wasn’t bothered with. I DID want to die after scattering my pollen, then running down my fist. It felt so strange, surprising and shocking. Of course it felt great, but it scared me. It felt wrong, foreign and apart from me. It was probably similar to what many girls feel upon beginning menstruation, but without the pleasure. I got over it.

I don’t really remember a similar “seminal” moment (hehe) when I discovered I liked other boys, but I DID exaggerate its seriousness. At all times. My experience with sex as a kid was nothing but a series of momentary desires, never much examined, never integrated into a relationship, a personal identity, or a target of desire. I lusted after boys in the shower and in the locker room in middle school. I lusted after men in the changing room at the beach.

I remember once going with my mother to visit her younger sister in her new apartment on a very hot summer day. At that time her sister was the black sheep of the family, running off with her bad-ass biker boyfriend when she was just in high school. As I walked down the dark hallway of her apartment alone to go to the bathroom, I looked inside one of the bedrooms, its door left open optimistically to circulate a little breeze. There sprawled out on his back on the king size bed, was my aunt’s naked boyfriend, fast asleep after working the night shift. I was stunned and struck with desire, staring at his large dick lying across his thigh and his arms flung up over his head. During that same visit I saw a brief glimpse of some pages of a Playgirl my aunt had lying in the apartment. My mother noticed the magazine, picked it up, and quickly flipped through it as she continued to talk to her sister, showing little interest in the photos. She allowed me to look, but she paged through quickly, believing, I imagine, that I had little interest in such things, being so young (and male). I had nothing but interest.

I would find my step-father’s porn magazines and focus on the spreads that featured men fucking women. It was the only porn available to me that showed men. I remember being happy when I found a girl that I thought was sexy—how could I be gay if I was attracted to that girl. I never pursued any outlet to my isolated desires until I was away from home, in college, and then it was only visiting porn shops occasionally. I knew somehow I had homosexual desires, but didn’t really believe I was gay. I acknowledged my tendencies enough to conceal them carefully, but not enough to integrate them into a sexual identity.

My exaggeration at the seriousness of my gay desires didn’t appear until I actually acted on the desires with another person. Actually, I exaggerated the seriousness only after arriving at the feeling that I wanted some openness about my homosexuality. I could continue to like gay porn and to have sex with guys, but as soon as I was pressed (by myself or others) to be gay, then it was gravely serious. Being gay or bisexual is no longer a serious matter to me.

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Proust gives hope to all of those who aspire to writing something noble or great someday but who haven’t the discipline to sit down and do the hard work of creating. For much of his life he lingered in the parlors and salons of Paris, thinking about writing but never actually doing it. What he’d written before his great work amounted to nothing much either in quantity or in substance. But late in life he began writing what would become one of the greatest (perhaps THE greatest) literary achievement in a century, a thing of exquisite beauty.

He talks about this in Time Regained, through the character of his narrator, who despaired of every being able to produce anything. “Really, I said to myself, what point is there in foregoing the pleasures of social life if, as seems to be the case, the famous ‘work’ which for so long I have been hoping every day to start the next day, is something I am not, or am no longer, made for and perhaps does not even correspond to any reality.” Many would-be writers have gone through this, and I suspect most never go on to produce anything much. He reached a point at which he believed he was “useless” and that he did not having “enough talent.” But then he had somewhat of an epiphany. “In my absent-minded state I had failed to see a car which was coming towards me; the chauffeur gave a shout and I just had time to step out of the way, but as I moved sharply backwards I tripped against the uneven paving-stones in front of the coach-house. And at the moment when, recovering my balance, I put my foot on a stone which was slightly lower than its neighbor, all my discouragement vanished and in its place was that same happiness which at various epochs of my life had been given to me by the sight of trees which I had thought that I recognized in the course of a drive near Balbec, by the sight of the twin steeples of Martinville, by the flavour of a Madeleine dipped in tea, and by all those other sensations of which I have spoken … Just as, at the moment when I tasted the Madeleine, all anxiety about the future, all intellectual doubts had disappeared, so now those that a few seconds ago had assailed me on the subject of the reality of my literary gifts, the reality even of literature, were removed as if by magic.”

He goes on to explain his ideas on memory, sensations, literature and life, which I haven’t the patience to try to understand. He talks of excuses which people use for not writing. “For instinct dictates our duty and the intellect supplies us with pretexts for evading it. But excuses have no place in art and intentions count for nothing: at every moment the artist has to listen to his instinct, and it is this that makes art the most real of all things, the most austere school of life, the true last judgment.” A little later he writes, “I had arrived then at the conclusion that in fashioning a work of art we are by no means free, that we do not choose how we shall make it but that it pre-exists us and therefore we are obliged, since it is both necessary and hidden, to do what we should have to do if it were a law of nature—to discover it. But this discovery which art obliges us to make, is it not, I thought, really the discovery of what, though it ought to be more precious to us than anything in the world, yet remains ordinarily for ever unknown to us, the discovery of our true life, of reality as we have felt it to be, which differs so greatly from what we think it is that when a chance happening brings us authentic memory of it we are filled with an immense happiness?”

What Proust has done in his great work is to fashion his own life into a work of art. His “In Search of Lost Time” doesn’t stray far from his own life. The narrator is a thinly veiled rendering of himself, and his characters merely renditions of his friends and acquaintances encountered during his salon years. In that sense it’s not an immensely creative work spun from nothing his own rich imagination. Edmund White has done the same sort of thing in his series of autobiographical novels, albeit not as beautifully presented.

Well, I’m done writing about Proust, at least for now. It’s boring reading—my recollections of reading Proust—but I feel like I have to note certain things as I’m reading them.