"Alas, it was this phantom that I saw when, entering the drawing-room before my grandmother had been told of my return, I found her there reading. I was in the room, or rather I was not yet in the room since she was not aware of my presence, and, like a woman whom one surprises at a piece of needlework which she will hurriedly put aside if anyone comes in, she was absorbed in thoughts which she had never allowed to be seen by me. Of myself - thanks to that privilege which does not last but which gives one, during the brief moment of return, the faculty of being suddenly the spectator of one's own absence - there was present only the witness, the observer, in travelling coat and hat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer who has called to take a photograph of places which one will never see again. The process that automatically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph. We never see the people who are dear to us save in the animated system, the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which, before allowing the images that their faces present to reach us, seizes them in its vortex and flings them back upon the idea that we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it. How, since into the forehead and the cheeks of my grandmother I had been accustomed to read all the most delicate, the most permanent qualities of her mind, how, since every habitual glance is an act of necromancy, each face that we love a mirror of the past, how could I have failed to overlook what had become fulled and changed in her, seeing that in the most trivial spectacles of our daily life, our eyes, charged with thought, neglect, as would a classical tragedy, every image that does not contribute to the action of the play and retain only those that may help to make its purpose intelligible. But if, instead of our eyes, it should happen to a purely physical object, a photographic plate, that has watched the action, then what we see, in the courtyard of the Institute, for example, instead of the dignified emergence of an Academician who is trying to fail a cab, will be his tottering steps, his precautions to avoid falling on his back, the parabola of his fall, as thought he were drunk or the ground covered with ice. So it is when some cruel trick of change prevents our intelligent and pious tenderness from coming forward in time to hide from our eyes what they ought never to behold, when it is forestalled by our eyes, and they, arriving first in the field and having it to themselves, set to work mechanically, like films, and show us, in place of the beloved person who has long ago ceased to exist but whose death our tenderness has hitherto kept concealed from us, the new person whom a hundred times daily it was clothed with a loving and mendacious likeness. And - like a sick man who, not having looked at his own reflexion for a long time, and regularly composing the features which he never sees in accordance with the ideal image of himself that he carries in his mind, recoils on catching sight in the glass, in the middle of an arid desert of a face, of the sloping pink protuberance of a nose as huge as one of the pyramids of Egypt - I, for whom my grandmother was still myself, I who had never seen her save in my own soul, always in the same place in the past, through the transparence of contiguous and overlapping memories, suddenly, in our drawing-room which formed part of anew world, that of time, that which is inhabited by the strangers of whom we say, 'He's begun to age a good deal,' for the first time and for a moment only, since she vanished very quickly, I saw, sitting on the sofa beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and vulgar, sick, vacant, letting her slightly crazed eyes wander over a book, a dejected old woman whom I did not know."
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 141-143
In the wake of my mother's long decline and eventual death, but also in light of just spending several days with my father, this is a painful but also very honest passage to reread. As Proust reminds us, "since every habitual glance is an act of necromancy, each face that we love a mirror of the past . . ." In this passage Proust is reflecting upon walking into a room and catching his grandmother unawares, and how he is distressed to find, not the woman of his memory, but, instead, "sitting on the sofa beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and vulgar, sick, vacant, letting her slight crazed eyes wander over a book, a dejected old woman whom I did not know." However disconcerting, isn't it our duty to get beyond the break from memory and understand and love the new normal?
The other reason why this passage hits home is the growing realization of my increasing frailty. When Proust writes, "But if, instead of our eyes, it should happen to a purely physical object, a photographic plate, that has watched the action, then what we see, in the courtyard of the Institute, for example, instead of the dignified emergence of an Academician who is trying to fail a cab, will be his tottering steps, his precautions to avoid falling on his back, the parabola of his fall, as thought he were drunk or the ground covered with ice . . ." I have the feeling that he could have describing the view that my friends and colleagues have of me. A few years ago I was engaged to a woman much younger than me, who had told me that the age difference meant nothing to her, but in the end I suspect that the reason why she called it off was because she realized, to her horror (because she was a very sweet soul), that it actually did matter. I threw my back out once and she had to help me on with my shoes so that we could go out for a walk on a foreign trip, and if I had to pick out a moment that marked the beginning of the end of the relationship it would be that otherwise tender moment. In my, admittedly romanticized, reflection on that moment it represented her understanding for the first time that this was doing to be the future, not then, but eventually, and it was a shock to the system. It seemed like she never viewed me the same way. However, as we've been discussing for months, memory is a malleable and undependable tool, and by making this about age then I'm giving myself - and her, I guess - a pass for other ways that we both failed the relationship and instead blamed it on something we couldn't control.
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