My Years With Proust - Day 706

    Life at such moments seems to us like a theatrical pageant in which from one act to another we see the baby turn into a youth and the youth into a mature man, who in the next act totters towards the grave.  And as it is through endless small changes that we feel that these beings, who enter our field of vision only at long intervals, can have  become so different, we feel that we ourselves must have followed the same law in virtue of which they have been so totally transformed that, without having ceased to exist, indeed just because they have never ceased to exist, indeed just because they have never ceased to exist, they no longer in any way resemble what we observed them to be in the past.

   A young woman whom I had known long ago, white-haired now and compressed into a little old witch, seemed to suggest that it is necessary, in the final scene of a theatrical entertainment, for the characters to be disguised beyond all recognition. But her brother was still so straight-backed, so like himself, that one was surprised on his youthful face to see a bristling moustache dyed white.  Indeed everywhere the patches of white in beards and moustaches hitherto entirely black lent a note of melancholy to the human landscape of the party, as do the first yellow leaves on the trees when one is still looking forward to a long summer, when before one has begun to enjoy the hot weather one sees that the autumn has arrived.  So that at last I, who from childhood had lived from day to day and had received, of myself and of others, impressions which I regarded as definitive, became aware as I had never been before - by an inevitable inference from the metamorphoses which had taken place in all the people around me - of the time which had passed for them, a notion which brought with it the overwhelming revelation that it had passed also for me.  And their old age, in itself a matter of indifference to me, froze my blood by announcing to me the approach of my own.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 966-967

I guess this is an appropriately somber fit for the last day of the year.  Proust, finally, has been shown into the party at the Guermantes mansion.  He had spent several moments, and a hundred pages, standing in the waiting room reflecting upon the three memory rushes that had launched another desire, an intensive and irresistible one, to understand the past and to write. Once inside he comes into contact with people he hasn't seen in years, and their age, dramatically reflected in some more than others, alerts him to his own mortality.

"Life at such moments seems to us like a theatrical pageant in which from one act to another we see the baby turn into a youth and the youth into a mature man, who in the next act totters towards the grave."

"A young woman whom I had known long ago, white-haired now and compressed into a little old witch, seemed to suggest that it is necessary, in the final scene of a theatrical entertainment, for the characters to be disguised beyond all recognition."

"And their old age, in itself a matter of indifference to me, froze my blood by announcing to me the approach of my own."

Since I never actually go home I guess my equivalent of this "theatrical pageant" is to peruse Facebook, which I've been on lately since, as I admitted earlier, I had to get back on FB to set up pages for the parents of my travelling students.