The glove turned inside out: Metaphor in Proust

Only Proust: would spend dozens of pages and thousands of words describing the moments before the narrator (M.) meets the girls who will dominate his life (in later volumes of Search for Lost Time), Albertine Simonet - the build-up to the "meet," the anticipation is for Proust more rich with meaning and feeling and even more climactic than than the relationship itself. So strange - it's a feeling that everyone knows, that every high-school student/teenager lives with and endures, the idealization of someone admired from afar, the moments, the hours, the life you imagine the two of you will have together, the conversations and interactions you fantasize and create - the image of the believed that you've created becomes more real than the beloved herself/himself and in fact the image becomes that which you love - and actually meeting the beloved can be only a disappointment - so you build the anticipation and hold on to it as long as possible - yes, everyone knows and understands this, but Proust alone makes art of this feeling - and the strange thing is that the process of idealizing the beloved is something like the process of writing a story or a novel, something created from nothing but memories and feelings, a life built of words. This another one of the Proustian twists, images and ideas falling in upon themselves, reversing like a glove flipped inside out: so often in Proust (as my old mentor Richard Macksey observed to me many years ago) a metaphor reverses: begins as X is like Y but by the end of the journey, is really a description not of Y but of X itself.