The oddness of Proust

I keep hammering on this not to diminish Proust but to help us see him as we should unerstand him: as an deeply alienated figure.

After Saint-Loup becomes his friend and says very kind things about the pleasure of being with him, Marcel thinks:

Such talk saddened me in a way, and I never knew how to respond to it: for in spending my time chatting with him, I felt none of the happiness I was capable of deriving from being without company; and in this, I suspect it would have been the same for me with any other person.

I love being alone myself but I could never say that. There are some people whom I like being with more than anything else in life. Marcel is just weird. There is very little to be gained by coming to understand our narrator or his creator. What makes Proust worth reading are the things this deeply alienated but very perceptive man noted about the people and society of his time.