I did not try to mitigate my suffering, to embellish it, to pretend that my grandmother was only somewhere else and momentarily invisible, by addressing to her photograph (the one taken by Saint-Loup, which I had with me) words and entreaties as to a person who is separated from us but, retaining his personality, knows us and remains bound to use by an indissoluble harmony. Never did I do this, for I was determined not merely to suffer, but to respect the original form of my suffering as it had suddenly come upon me unawares, and I wanted to continue to feel it, following its own laws, whenever that contradiction of survival and annihilation, so strangely intertwined within me, returned. I did not know whether I should one day distil a grain of truth from this painful and for the moment incomprehensible impression, but I knew that if I ever did extract some truth from life, it could only be from such an impression and from none other, an impression at once so particular and so spontaneous, which had neither been traced by my intelligence nor attenuated by my pusillanimity, but which death itself, the sudden revelation of death, striking like a thunderbolt, had carved within me, along a supernatural and inhuman graph, in a double and mysterious furrow. (As for the state of forgetfulness of my grandmother in which I had been living until that moment, I could not even think of clinging to it to find some truth; since in itself it was nothing but a negation, a weakening of the faculty of thought incapable of recreating a real moment of life and obliged to substitute for it conventional and neutral images.) Perhaps, however, the instinct of self-preservation, the ingenuity of the mind in safeguarding us from pain, already beginning to lay the foundations of its necessity but baneful edifice on the still smoking ruins, I relished too keenly the sweet joy of recalling this or that opinion held by the beloved being, recalling them as though she had been able to hold them still, as though she existed, as though I continued to exist for her.
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 786-787
Proust continues to reflect upon the pain of his grandmother's passing, and to live within that pain and to know it. He was determined not to hide it or to mitigate it in any form, although he wasn't really certain if it would lead him anywhere: "I did not know whether I should one day distil a grain of truth from this painful and for the moment incomprehensible impression . . ." However, he somehow knew that if he was going to learn something, anything, about the sorrow of his grandmother's death, or, in a larger sense, life itself, it would have to come from from a place of such pure pain. He continues, "but I knew that if I ever did extract some truth from life, it could only be from such an impression and from none other . . ." In a life of clumsy misconceptions and conscious outright lies, all of which seems particularly relevant in today's world of Trumpian post-truths, there was a truth, a reality, a purity to be found in pain and loss. Digging deeper, Proust reflects, "I was determined not merely to suffer, but to respect the original form of my suffering as it had suddenly come upon me unawares, and I wanted to continue to feel it, following its own laws, whenever that contradiction of survival and annihilation, so strangely intertwined within me, returned." Granted, there is a vanity to suffering, wherein the suffering is really just about us, and people recognizing our suffering, and not about what we have lost, which is why I've always respected the Jewish tradition of providing a very structured period for public demonstrations of loss and suffering, and beyond which it is really disrespectful to the deceased. What you carry in your heart, of course, can go on for years. Still, in suffering there is a directness, again, a purity, that is not contaminated by self-perception or justification or the rewriting of our own personal history to fit our own life novel. But, too quickly, it can take on a life of its own and can become a passion as distracting and ravenous as any other, as Proust writes, "I relished too keenly the sweet joy of recalling this or that opinion held by the beloved being, recalling them as though she had been able to hold them still, as though she existed, as though I continued to exist for her."
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