My Year With Proust - Day 337

   At last I had the pleasure of seeing Swann come into this room, which was extremely large, so large that he did not at first catch sight of me.  A pleasure mingled with sadness, a sadness which the other guests did not, perhaps, feel, their feeling consisting rather in that sort of fascination which is exercised by the strange and unexpected signs of an approaching death, a death that a man already has, in the popular saying, written on his face.  And it was with an almost offensive amazement, in which there were elements of tactless curiosity, of cruelty, of relieved and at the same time anxious self-scrutiny (a blend of suave mari magno and memento quia pulvis, Robert would have said), that all eyes were fastened on that fact the cheeks of which had been so eaten away, so whittled down, by illness, like a waning moon, that except at a certain angle, the angle doubtless from which Swann looked at himself, they stopped short like a flimsy piece of scenery to which only an optical illusion can add the appearance of depth.  Whether because of the absence of those cheeks, no longer there to modify it, or because arteriosclerosis, which is also a form of intoxication, had reddened it as would drunkenness, or deformed it as would morphine, Swann's punchinello nose, absorbed for long years into an agreeable face, seemed now enormous, tumid, crimson, the nos of an old Hebrew rather than of a dilettante Valois. Perhaps, too, in these last days, the physical type that characterises his race was becoming more pronounced in him, at the same time as a sense of moral solidarity with the rest of the Jews, a solidarity which Swann seemed to have forgotten throughout his life, and which, one after another, his mortal illness, the Dreyfus case and the anti-semitic propaganda had reawakened.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 715

Proust finally gets to spend some time with Swann, and is shocked and saddened by his appearance as the cancer eats away at his long-time friend.  The two Latin quotes, suave mari magno (essentially, it is pleasant to watch in a great sea - it's the beginning of a longer passage, essentially about the difference between those who have a philosophical foundation and thus understanding and those who don't) and memento quia pulvia (remember, you are dust - again, the beginning of a longer passage, repeated in the Catholic liturgy, reminding followers that they would return to dust) emphasize that moment of realization when you come face to face with death.  This, of course, usually explains why we don't go to see dying friends - not because of our concern for their pain, but rather the reminder of our own mortality.