My Year With Proust - Day 221

"Certain very old men, and young women who had heard it from those men, told me that if these ladies were no longer received in society it was because of the extraordinary dissoluteness of their conduct, which, when I objected that dissolute conduct was not necessarily a barrier to social success, was represented to me as having gone far beyond anything to be met with to-day.  The misconduct of these solemn dames who held themselves so erect assumed on the lips of those who hinted at it something that I was incapable of imagining, something proportionate to the magnitude of prehistoric days, to the age of the mammoth.  In a word, these three Parcae with their white or blue or pink hair had been the ruin of an incalculable number of gentlemen.  It struck me that the men of to-day exaggerated the vices of those fabulous times, like the Greeks who created Icarus, Theseus, Heracles out of men who had been but little different from those who long afterwards deified them.  But one does not tabulate the sum of a person's vices until he has almost ceased to be in a fit state of practice them, when from the magnitude of his social punishment, which is then nearing the completion of its term and which alone one can estimate, on measures, one imagines, on exaggerates the magnitude of the crime that has been committed."

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 201-202

Proust is discussing three old women, "three fallen goddesses," who were no longer received in the best houses because of their alleged crimes against propriety if not all of history.  I don't know if I have anything profound to add to this passage, although I hope I am viewed with so awe when I reach my true dotage.  Two of my oldest friend, Bill and Kathy Farrington (I'll include pictures soon) are visiting me here in Vermont right now, which, of course, led to certain reflections on our time in college, including the fact that I was referred to as Scary Gary for a while.  Doubtless my crimes are much more profound and numerous now, although, sadly, and unlike Dorian Grey, I carry my corruption around with me all the time and it is not locked away in a room upstairs.