My Year With Proust - Day 228

   "Robert swept me back to his mother.

   'Good-bye,' he said to her.  'I've got to got now.  I don't know when I shall get leave again.  Probably not for a month.  I shall write to you as soon as I know.'

   Certainly Robert was not in the least the sort of son who, when he goes out with his mother, feels that an attitude of exasperation towards her ought to counterbalance the smiles and greetings which he bestows on strangers.  Nothing is more prevalent than this odious form of vengeance on the part of those who appear to believe that rudeness to one's own family is the natural complement to ceremonial behaviour.  Whatever the wretched mother may say, her son, as though he had been brought along against his will and wishes to make her pay dearly for his presence, immediately refutes the timidly ventured assertion with a sarcastic, precise, cruel contradiction; the mother at once conforms, though without thereby disarming him, to the opinion of this superior being whose delightful nature she will continue to vaunt to all and sundry in his absence, but who, for all that spares her none of his most wounding remarks.  Saint-Loup was not at all like this; but the anguish which Rachel's absence provoked in him caused him for different reasons to be no less harsh with his mother than those other sons are with theirs.  And as she listened to him I saw the same throb, like the beating of a wing, which Mme de Marsantes had been unable to repress when her son first entered the room, convulse her whole body once again; but this time it was an anxious face and woe-begone eyes that she fastened on him.

   'What, Robert, you're going off?  Seriously?  My little son - the one day I had a chance to see something of you!' . . .

   . . . I was fully aware that my company could not afford any pleasure to Mme de Marsantes, but I was glad not to give her the impression by leaving with Robert that I was involved in these pleasures which deprived her of him.  I should have liked to find some excuse for her son's conduct, less from affection for him than from pity for her.  But it was she who spoke first.

   'Poor boy,' she began, 'I'm sure I must have hurt him dreadfully.  You see, Monsieur, mothers are such selfish creatures.  After all, he hasn't many pleasures, he comes so seldom to Paris.  Oh, dear, if he hadn't gone already I should have liked to stop him, not to keep him of course, but just to tell him that I'm not vexed with him, that I think he was quite right.  Will you excuse me if I go and look over the staircase?'

   I accompanied her there.

   'Robert! Robert!' she called.  'No, he's gone.  It's too late.'

   At that moment I would as gladly have undertaken a mission to make Robert break with his mistress as, a few hours earlier, to make him go and live with her altogether. In the one case Saint-Loup would have regarded me as a false friend, in the other his family would have called me his evil genius.  Yet I was the same man at an interval of a few hours."

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 289-291

Proust witnesses an exchange between his friend Robert and his mother.  In most ways Robert appears to be a decent son, at least he's not one who goes out of his way to make his mother miserable.  Maybe, as with most of us, his main crime is forgetfulness.  I remember reading Nasr's brilliant The Heart of Islam and him making the point that for most Muslims the greatest conceivable crime was forgetfulness.  He meant that in a more devoutly religious society it was inconceivable that you would willingly divorce yourself from God, so the most logical answer was simply that you forgot your tie to God.  When I read that passage I thought that while it certainly made sense in regard to the divine (no matter how you perceive it) but also to our parents.  Unless they were brutal people who abused us, we all owe a tremendous debt to our parents; we just sometimes forget.  We drift.  I'm remarkably guilty of that.  Robert's mother's response ("I'm sure I must have hurt him dreadfully.  You see, Monsieur, mothers are such selfish creatures.") was a classic good mother thing to say.  I remember visiting Dave Kelley mom, who I referred to as the sainted Mrs. Kelley, once and, with Dave out of earshot, she said, "You know, I think he's perfect."  I could not, and cannot, disagree.  And it occurred to me then that this was one of the reasons why Dave turned out to be such a fine man.  That said, I will take ownership of all of my extraordinary shortcomings.

On my trip back to Indiana I took the opportunity to visit my people, which led to trips to cemeteries in Rising Sun and Moores Hill.  I found my mom's grave, which didn't have a tombstone, at least not yet (although she didn't seem particularly interested in one).  I'm assuming one of my siblings left this marker made from twigs, which I found metaphorically pitch perfect and emotionally crippling.