Let Us Leave Pretty Women To Men With No Imagination

Most people, at some point in their lives or another, have been "many things to many people." It's a common thing to be in a world with such varied avenues to digesting the essence of the people we interact with on a daily basis. Of course, as the digital realm expands and the funnel through which we deliver ourselves widens at the bottom (or narrows, depending on how consistent one's delivery of themselves is across platforms), this would become more (or less, respectively) true today than ever before.

To the same effect, there is the expression that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." This precursor to the above idea, that the visual representation of a person is of different levels of allure to different people, was touched upon in my reading today. Here, Proust ends up tying both of these concepts together:

"So the difference in optics extends not only to people's physical appearance but to their character, and to their individual importance. It is more likely than not that the woman who is causing the man who loves her to suffer has always behaved good-naturedly towards someone who was indifferent to her, as Odette, who was so cruel to Swann, had been the kind, attentive 'lady in pink' to my great uncle," (Proust, 447)

I re-read this passage a few times, along with the paragraphs prior to and following it, when it stumbled upon it. In context, it illuminates some of the finer details of life for people in Proust's circles at the time that had been touched upon but never quite spelled out prior. As some people are kind, polite, or doting to person x or y in certain social situations, they can be wholly different to other people (or even the same person x or y) in a different social setting or situation. This occurs where Proust overhears St. Loup discussing unkind actions to take towards a helpless person later in the chapter. However, the provided example in the passage of Odette and her behaviors towards Swann and Proust's great uncle, is quite clear. 

Much like Odette's behaviors towards those two men were drastically different due to what position they occupied in her life, so do the behaviors and temperaments of many people throughout the novels differ based on the receiver of the actions or temperaments. This reality has not changed today, I suspect, as there are people I have met (and this observation is largely only possible due to my recent move to an area where I really did not know many people, nor did I know the reputations of the people I did not know when I arrived) who play largely different roles in their interactions with me than they do in their interactions with other people .

While this is, of course, not a shocking revelation to most people, I found it very interesting to see it remarked upon so clearly. Of course, the difference in behavior of a prostitute to a customer compared to a man who loves her is not exactly parallel to those differences in behavior I find in people I meet today, but the use of such a simplified example made the realities of my daily life much more vivid. Sometimes, all it takes is comparing your friends to a scheming, selfish prostitute to figure out just how they fit into the picture they share with yourself and those around you.