Some beautiful passages in Volume 5, the Prisoner, in Proust's Search for Lost Time

 I have slowly and attentively been reading volume 5 - The Prisoner - in Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Carol Clark tr. ; now I'm at about the midpoint - 200 dense and often difficult passages covering a sliver of time, three days so far I think, in which not much "happens" in the conventional sense - the narrator, Marcel, spends his days at home in his bedroom (for the most part) as his beloved Albertine, now living w/ him in an arrangement that seems improbable for its era (she's in an adjacent bedroom in the rather large apartment of his family - mother, father, himself + servants), goes off on various jaunts with her friends, leaving Marcel restless and anguished. This volume is entirely focused on jealousy, which Marcel suggests makes his love all the more sharp and intense and gives him the necessary separation from his beloved to analyze, observe, and write. That's a somewhat thin thread, and in some ways we just want to say to Marcel, get over it, get on w/ it (i.e., your writing). We can understand this section better if we know even a little bit about Proust's life, notably that he was a homosexual and had a long relationship w/ a chauffeur (his family's employee, I think); this would explain the access to each other in the family household and would add dimension to his fear that Albertine when left to her own was having sexual relationships w/ other women - sub in the chauffeur, about whom Proust evidently did not wish to write about directly- and the Marcel-Albertine relationship makes more sense. All that said, we don't read Proust for the plot but for the many insights into memory, human consciousness, art, and beauty; this volume has fewer of these "apercus" than we find in the preceding 4, though some are laugh-out-loud (Proust on the insidious nature of publishers, others of showing insight and beauty, such as this description of Wagner's music: "those insistent, fleeting themes which appear in one act, fade away only to return, and sometimes distant, muted, almost detached, at at other times, while still vague, so immediate, so pressing, so internal, organic, visceral that their return seems not so much that of a motif as of a nerve pain." He could be, he is, describing his own work. Or this concise description, admiring one they pass by as he walks with Albertine, a summary of this entire volume: "We find desiring innocent, and hideous that the other should desire." Or this of his life: "Love, no, pleasure well rooted in the flesh helps literary work because it cancels out other pleasures, the pleasures of social life, for example, which are these for everyone. " Or this on his major theme: "Memory is not a copy, always present to our eyes, of the various events of our life, but rather a void from which, every now and then, a present resemblance allow us to recover, to resurrect, dead recollections the there are also thousands of tiny facts which never fell into this well of potential memory and which we shall never be able to check."