My Year With Proust - Day 91

"Now, fully as much as retirement, ill-health or religious conversion, a protracted love affair will substitute fresh visions for the old."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 506

I don't think I can speak for all of these eventualities, but I'm sure that Proust is correct once again.  A very good friend of mine, who is actually six years younger than me, tells me with complete sincerity that he begins and ends each day with thoughts of retirement.  I've certainly not reached that point, and, truthfully, the thought of retirement fills me with dread.  The thought of spending the last few years of my life puttering around the house just sounds like hell.  This, of course, means that I've probably lived my life poorly and have devoted too much of my time and effort and emotional capital in the pursuit of my career, which, considering what a middling success I've enjoyed, is about as good an investment as following the Vikings for forty-six years (we both came into existence in the same year, which I'm sure is a metaphor that even my students could decipher).  As we've discussed before, it seems to me that so much of Remembrance of Things Past, and I guess all literature, is an exploration of liminal spaces.  In all of these instances, retirement, ill-health, religious conversion and a protract love affair, they all relate to transitions.  Or, maybe more accurately, they relate to the destruction of some aspect of the self and its replacement with "fresh visions."  In one of my favorite Hadiths the prophet said, "the best jihad is the conquest of the self," and maybe the reason why all of these instances produce new visions is that, in some fashion or another, the older visions - just as the older self - are being destroyed and must be replaced.