Marcel, meet Tina

I am pleased to announce that I have finished Swann's Way and In a Budding Grove, the first volume of my three-volume Proust (1018 pages). I am less pleased to announce that the second volume has close to 1300 pages. However, before I leave the first volume behind, I have promised to explain how reading Proust in conjunction with Tina Fey provides insight into at least one universal question. It should be noted that I do not own Tina Fey's book, Bossypants, nor have I read it, but I have heard her reading from it on NPR several times. In a very funny passage called "A Mother's Prayer for Her Child," Fey writes: "May she be Beautiful but not Damaged, for it's the Damage that draws the creepy soccer coach's eye, not the Beauty. ... May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her own Heart with the sinewy strength of her own Arms so that she need Not Lie with Drummers."

Clearly Fey's profession is as full as mine is with young women--many of them both precocious and "damaged"--who fall prey to the attraction of the infamous "older man." We all know what attracts these women to such men--it feels good to be flattered by your superiors and made to feel special--but what (other than the obvious) is the attraction for these men? It is the job of precocious, damaged, twenty-year-olds to hit on fifty-year-old professors. It is the job of those professors to gently push them away. So why don't they? (I don't believe it's just a sex thing. Really.)

Marcel has a good answer: "In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses a woman's heart may be enough to make him fall in love with her."

Brilliant! No wonder all those middle-aged men are putty in the hands of precocious young women. The infatuation works both ways. She is infatuated with him because he is so much older, wiser, more dignified, and so on, while he is infatuated with her merely because she is infatuated with him.

Thank you, Marcel, for that amazing bit of insight.