"Very well, give me in one word the reason why you can't come to Italy," the Duchess put it to Swann as she rose to say good-bye to us.
"But, my dear lady, it's because I shall then have been dead for several months. According to the doctors I've consulted, by the end of the year the thing I've got - which may, for that matter, carry me off at any moment - won't in any case leave me more than three or four months to live, and even that is a generous estimate," replied Swann with a smile, while the footman opened the glazed door of the hall to let the Duchess out.
"What's that you say?" cried the Duchess, stopping for a moment on her way to the carriage and raising her beautiful, melancholy blue eyes, now clouded by uncertainty. Place for the first time in her life between two duties as incompatible as getting into her carriage to go out to dinner and showing compassion for a man who was about to die, she could find nothing in the code of conventions that indicated the right line to follow; not knowing which to choose, she felt obliged to pretend not to believe that the latter alternative need be seriously considered, in order to comply with the first, which at the moment demanded less effort, and thought that the best way of settling the conflict would be to deny that any existed. "You're joking," she said to Swann.
"It would be a joke in charming taste," he replied ironically. "I don't know why I'm telling you this. I've never said a word to you about my illness before. But since you asked me, and since now I may die at any moment . . . But whatever I do I mustn't make you late; you're dining out, remember," he added, because he knew that for other people their own social obligations took precedence over the death of a friend, and he put himself in their place thanks to his instinctive politeness. . .
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 617-618
And we now find out just how sick Swann is, as he admits to the Duchess that he can't possibly come to Italy because "I shall then have been dead for several months." the Duchess, a product of the social niceties of high society, is struck between the need to get to dinner and the lingering sense that maybe she should spend time with a dying friend; of course, in the end, the demands of society win out. I guess I'm viewing everything in the light of Donald Trump's unexpected (well, sort of unexpected) win last night. Why do we keep electing the super rich and then sit stunned when we discover that they simply don't give a fuck about us? I have this theory that the brains of the super rich are actually different than the brains of everyone else, and not in a good way. We want to think that they are such selfish pricks because they were raised a certain way, and doubtless there is truth to that. But, as we know, environmental factors can also influence the composition of the brain, and somehow I have this lingering feeling that the part of the brain which deals with cause and effect, which doesn't normally mature until the early twenties, never actually matures at all in the brain of the super rich because cause and effect has never meant anything. Nothing bad has ever happened since they are born with dozens of golden parachutes, and so they can't fail. We saw this with George W. Bush, who, I think in the big picture, probably was a good man, but one who wasn't that bright and didn't really have the mental processing ability to understand that something like invading Iraq on a whim could end badly - and for which we'll still paying today. Trump is more dangerous because he's also not very bright and he's never had to deal with negative consequences - and he's also a mean-spirited, ego-maniacal, misogynistic racist. We should ask someone to pray for us, but we did it to ourselves and we probably deserve everything we get. I saw today that Trump won the election by gathering a grand total of 25.5% of the total US electorate (whereas Clinton picked up 25.6% of the vote, but lost big through the miracle of the Electoral College). Pathetic.
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