My Year With Proust - Day 141

"It is they - even the meanest of them, such as our obscure attachments to the dimensions, to the atmosphere of a bedroom - that take fright and refuse, in acts of rebellion which we must recognise to be a secret, partial, tangible and true aspect of our resistance to death, of the long, desperate, daily resistance to the fragmentary and continuous death that insinuates itself throughout the whole course of our life, detaching from us at each moment a shred of ourself, dead matter on which new cells will multiply and grow. And for a neurotic nature such as mine - one, that is to say, in which the intermediaries, the nerves, perform their functions badly, failed to arrest on its way to the consciousness, allow indeed to reach it, distinct, exhausting, innumerable and distressing, the plaints of the most humble elements of the self which are about to disappear - the anxiety and alarm which I felt as I lay beneath that strange and too lofty ceiling were but the protest of an affection that survived in me for a ceiling that was familiar and low.  Doubtless this affection too would disappear, another having taken its place (when death, and then another life, had, in the guide of Habit, performed their double task); but until its annihilation, every night it would suffer afresh, and on this first night especially, confronted with an irreversible future in which there would no longer be any place for it, it rose in revolt, it tortured me with the sound of its lamentations whenever my straining eyes, powerless to turn from what was wounding them, endeavoured to fasten themselves up that inaccessible ceiling."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 722-723

Proust writes of "our resistance to death, of the long, desperate, daily resistance to the fragmentary and continuous death insinuates itself throughout the whole course of our life, detaching from us at each moment a shred of ourself, dead matter on which new cells will multiply and grow."  This is either a remarkably poorly timed or a brilliantly serendipitous passage to reflect upon on the rainy and dreary day of my mother's funeral.  My mother fought long and hard against death, although I don't think it as based on the fear of dying but rather her own contrary and combative nature.  There is a time, just as with George's mother Elizabeth in Winesburg, Ohio when you envision death as a beautiful lover to whom you reach out your hand.  In the end my mother was ready.

And so then the question becomes, am I ready?  Proust writes extensively about the demands of Habit, and how it lead us to live a life that is almost sedated if we're not careful.  What was at one time shocking or wonderful or transcendent becomes the new normal.  It is not entirely terrible, obviously, if you're mindful of it, because it allows you to live through just about anything.  It is terrible, however, when it so chloroforms our senses that we can't feel anything at all.  It seems to me that the key, in a very Proustian way, would be to capture the most essential moments, and that doesn't mean just the good ones, and nurture them so that they are preserved.