We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say this we think of that hour as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time; it does not occur to us that it can have any connexion with the day that has already dawned and can mean that death - or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold of us again - may occur this very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon whose time-table, hour by hour, has been settled in advance. One insists on one's daily outing so that in a month's time one will have had the necessary ration of fresh air; one has hesitated over which coat to take, which cabman to call; one must be back home early, as a friend is coming to see one; one hopes that it will be as fine again to-morrow; and one has no suspicion that death, which has been advancing within one on another plane, shrouded in an impenetrable darkness, has chosen precisely this particular day to make its appearance, in a few minutes' time, more or less at the moment when the carriage reaches the Champs-Elysees. Perhaps those who are habitually haunted by the fear of the utter strangeness of death will find something reassuring in this kind of death - in this kind of first contact with death - because death thus assumes a known, familiar, everyday guise. A good lunch has preceded it, and the same outing that people take who are in perfect health. A drive home in an open carriage comes on top of its first onslaught; ill as my grandmother was, there were, after all, several people who could testify that at six c'clock, as we came home from the Champs-Elysees, they had bowed to her as she drove past in an open carriage, in perfect weather. Legrandin, making his way towards the Place de la Concorde, raised his hat to us, stopping to look after us with an air of surprise. I, who was not yet detached from life, asked my grandmother if she had acknowledged his greeting, reminding her of his touchiness. My grandmother, thinking me no doubt very frivolous, raised her hand in the air as though to say: "What does it matter? It's of no importance."
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 324-325
Not surprisingly, Marcel becomes fixated on death enters the final stretch of her life. As humans we've always personified death (and I'll avoid incorporating the section from Sherwood Anderson's brilliant story "Death," where George's dying grandmother personifies envisions death as a young lover, mainly because I'm sure I've included it before). Certainly it's been a staple of mythology, but it has always played an active role in popular culture as well, whether it's Max von Sydow playing chess with death in The Seventh Seal or Woody Allen being led away by a dancing death in Love and Death or even Archer being educated by a "cut rate James Mason." I suppose it isn't all that surprising because as scary as those anthropomorphic figures are they are probably still less terrifying than the blackness of the unknowable. Proust writes, "We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say this we think of that hour as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time; it does not occur to us that it can have any connexion with the day that has already dawned and can mean that death - or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold of us again - may occur this very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon whose time-table, hour by hour, has been settled in advance." Death, again personified, makes a "first assault" and will "never leave hold of us again." At the same time Proust touches upon the unpredictability of death (and I can't help flashing back to the opening scene of American Beauty). It's always, naturally, far off in the future. My father always joked that middle age always began at your present age plus eleven years, and maybe in the end that's how we view death. And maybe somehow the thought of a personified death is a more calming alternative than the randomness of death interrupting a perfectly lovely day.
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