My Year With Proust - Day 288

   I had not seen Swann for a long time, and found myself wondering momentarily whether in the old days he used to clip his moustache, or whether his hair had not been enbrosse, for I found him somehow changed.  It was simply that he was indeed greatly "changed" because he was very ill, and illness produces in the face modifications as profound as are created by growing a beard or by changing one's parting.  (Swann's illness was the same that had killed his mother, who had been struck down by it at precisely the age which he had now reached.  Our lives are in truth, owing to heredity,as full of cabalistic ciphers, of horoscopic castings as if sorcerers really existed.  And just as there is a certain duration of life for humanity in general, so there is one for families in particular, that is to say, in any one family, for the members of it who resemble one another.).

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, p. 601

Swann arrives at the party, and returns to the story, although it is a sad reunion because he is dying.  And he is dying of the same disease at the very same time in life as the condition that claimed his mother.  As Proust reminds us, "Our lives are in truth, owing to heredity, as full of cabalistic ciphers, of horoscopic castings as if sorcerers really existed."  I am a Scudder man, which means I will auger into the ground from a heart attack in my late seventies, which I suppose is a goodly amount of time on this earth, although I suspect that at the time it won't seem like enough.  Or maybe my health will have failed years before and it will seem like way too much time to be trapped in this increasingly creaky body, this antiquated contraption, from which I'll want to be freed.  I've often talked about the need to leave your little corner of the world a better place than you found it, and I predict that my view of the timing of my demise will depend upon my feelings at the time of whether or not I'm still producing more than I'm consuming, giving more than I'm taking.  Am I cutting into the great storehouse of merit?  That would bother me, ad would simply existing with no purpose.  We'll return to Swann shortly.