My Year With Proust - Day 352

   Disruption of my entire being.  On the first night, as I was suffering from cardiac fatigue, I bent down slowly and cautiously to take off my boots, trying to master my pain.  But scarcely had I touched the topmost button than my chest swelled, filled with an unknown, a divine presence, I was shaken with sobs, tears streamed from my eyes.  The being who had come to my rescue, saving me from barrenness of spirit, was the same who, years before, in a moment of identical distress and loneliness, in a moment when I had nothing left of myself, had come in and restored me to myself, for that being was myself and something more than me (the container that is greater than the contained and was bringing it to me).  I had just perceived, in my memory, stooping over my fatigue, the tender, preoccupied, disappointed face of my grandmother, as she had been on that first evening of our arrival, the face not of that grandmother whom I had been astonished and remorseful at having so little missed, and who had nothing in common with her save her name, but of my real grandmother, of whom, for the first time since the afternoon of her stroke in the Champs-Elysees, I now recaptured the living reality in a complete and involuntary recollection. This reality does not exist for us so long as it has not been recreated by our thought (otherwise men who had been engaged in a titanic struggle with all of them be great epic poets); and thus, in my wild desire to fling myself into her arms, it was only at that moment - more than a year after her burial, because of the anachronism which so often prevents the calendar of facts from corresponding to the calendar of feelings - that I became conscious that she was dead.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 783

This is a beautiful, thoughtful and heart-rending passage.  Marcel has returned to Balbec and he is suddenly overwhelmed by the gentle but also painful presence of his grandmother.  It is his first visit to Balbec since the passing of his grandmother, and it becomes terribly real; as he reflects, "I became conscious that she was dead."  However, at the same time he regained his grandmother, his "real grandmother," the one who supported him and populated his dreams before her stroke; not that husk that barely existed afterwards.  It seems to me that memories, like ghosts, haunt certain locales, which make those frail of heart more than a little afraid to revisit these haunted spaces, these crossroads.  My own experience with locations like this relate more to the death of a love affair than the death of an individual.  I can think of locations, most notably Vienna and Zanzibar, that I never wanted to visit again because they were places that I visited with a lover, and the thought of going there alone seemed horrible.  Proust warns us of the "anachronism which so often prevents the calendar of facts from corresponding to the calendar of feelings."  However, I survived those return visits, and discovered to my joy (and relief) that those ghosts were friendly ones.