My Years With Proust - Day 405

To be sure, these common travellers would have been less interested than myself - notwithstanding the fame that several of the faithful had achieved - had anyone quoted in their hearing the names of these men whom I was astonished to see continuing to dine out when many of them had already been doing so, according to the stories that I had heard, before my birth, at a period at once so distant and so vague that I was inclined to exaggerate its remoteness.  The contrast between the continuance not only of their existence, but of the fullness of their powers, and the obliteration of so many friends whom I had already seen vanish here or there, gave me the same feeling that we experience when in the stop-press column of the newspapers we read the very announcement that we least expected, for instanced that of an untimely death, which seems to us fortuitous because the causes that have led up to it have remained outside our knowledge.  This is the feeling that death does not descend uniformly upon all men, but that a more advanced wave of its tragic tide carries off a life situated at the same level as others which the waves that follow will long continue to spare.  

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 895-896

I've reached the age when, sadly, my friends are starting to shuffle off this mortal coil with increasing consistency.  I suppose every year from now the passages will seem more logical and less random, more divinely sanctioned and less needing of some explanation from God for his/her/its/their seeming random mean-spiritedness.  Proust writes, "This is the feeling that death does not descend uniformly upon all men, but that a more advanced wave of its tragic tide carries off a life situated at the same level as others which the waves that follow will long continue to spare."  A very good friend of mine, a man so much better than me in every conceivable way, has been fighting a heroic battle with cancer for over a year, and yet someone such as myself who has, doubtless, created more harm than good, traipses along.  The Hebrews raised this question in the Book of Job thousands of years ago, but we're no closer to sorting it out today.  Unless you think of the totality of one's existence, both in this mortal plain and beyond, it seems arbitrary and more than a bit cruel, but I guess this is why we have faith.  Still, we somehow suppose that we will exist long enough for it all to make sense (and we get to see Trump roast in Hell) but in the end God is not math (although recurring geometric patterns form an essential part of Islamic art because it is a lovely metaphor for the eternity and logic of the divine) and it doesn't necessarily have to add up (at least in a fashion that we can access).

Life is seldom this beautiful or this logical.