I offered him my arm to guide him on his way. "This time it is not by great Charbourg that we meet," he said to me, "but by little Dunkirk," a remark which I found extremely tiresome, as I did not understand what it meant; and yet I darted not ask Brichot, dreading not so much his scorn as his explanations. I replied that I was longing to see the drawing-room in which Swann used to meet Odette every evening. "What, so you know that old story, do you?" he said. "And yet from those days until Swann's death there's what the poet rightly calls 'grande spatium mortalis aevi.'"
Swann's death had deeply distressed me at the time. Swann's death! Swann's, in this phrase, is something more than a mere genitive. I mean thereby his own particular death, the death assigned by destiny to the service of Swann. For we talk of "Death" for convenience, but there are almost as many different deaths as there are people. We do not possess a sense that would enable us to see, moving at full speed in every direction, these deaths, the active deaths aimed by destiny at this person or that. Often they are deaths that will not be entirely relieved of their duties until two or even three years later. They come in haste to plant a tumour in the side of a Swann, then depart to attend to other tasks, returning only when, the surgeons having performed their operations, it is necessary to plant the tumour there afresh. Then comes the moment when we read in the Gaulois that Swann's health has been causing anxiety but that he is now making an excellent recovery. Then, a few minutes before the last gasp, death, like a sister of charity who has come to nurse rather than to destroy us, enters to preside over our last moments, and crowns with a final aureole the cold and stiffening creatures whose heart has ceased to beat. And it is this diversity of deaths, the mystery of their circuits, the colour of their fatal badge, that makes so moving a paragraph in the newspapers as this:
"We learn with deep regret that M. Charles Swann passed away yesterday at his residence in Paris after a long and painful illness. A Parisian whose wit was widely appreciated, a discriminating but steadfastly loyal friend, he will be universally mourned, not only in those literary and artistic circles where the rare discernment of his taste made him a willing and a welcome guest, but also at the Jockey Club of which has was one of the oldest and most respected members. He belonged also to the Union and the Agricole. He had recently resigned his membership of the Rue Royale. His witty and striking personality never failed to arouse the interest of the public at all the great events of the musical and artistic seasons,notably at private views, where he was a regular attendant until the last few years, when he rarely left his house. The funeral will take place, etc."
Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 197-198
Charles Swann cast such a lengthy shadow over the early volumes of Remembrance of Things Past, including providing the name for volume one, Swann's Way, but then he faded into the background. The penultimate line of the obituary, where we are told that "he was a regular attendant until the last few years, when he rarely left his house" might serve as a description for his role in the novel as well. Swann's sickness and his death were mentioned in passing a few times, but this is the first time that Proust dealt with it directly. Even here, however, he takes the opportunity to speak of death more generally and more philosophically.
To return to more general realities, it was of this death of his, foretold and yet unforeseen, that I had heard Swann speak himself to the Duchesse de Guermantes, on the evening of her cousin's party. It was the same death whose striking and specific strangeness had recurred to me one evening when, as I ran my eye over the newspaper, my attention was suddenly arrested by the announcement of it, as though traced in mysterious lines inopportunely interpolated there. They had sufficed to make of a living man someone who could never again respond to what one said to him, to reduce him to a mere name, a written name, that had suddenly passed from the real world to the realm of silence. It was they that even now gave me a desire to get to know the house in which the Verdurins had formerly lived, and where Swann, who at that time was not merely a row of letters printed in a newspaper, had dined so often with Odette. I must also add (and this is what for a long time made Swann's death more painful than any other, although these reasons bore no relation to the individual strangeness of his death) that I had never gone to see Gilberte as I promised him at the Princesse de Guermantes's . . (pp. 199-200)
Proust opines, "For we talk of "Death" for convenience, but there are almost as many different deaths as there are people." In Concepts of the Self the students will read, and gripe about, Freeland's Portraits & Persons (well, the students in the other COR 110 classes will, because whining is not an option in mine). One of her points that does resonate with the students is her discussion of the different versions of the Self: Bodily, Relational, Reflective and Moral. That is, our perceptions of self, and thus our creation of our own Self, are shaped by different factors. One Self, the Relational Self, relates to how we are defined and in turn define ourselves by our association with others, and, naturally, this changes throughout your life (it does with the other versions of the Self as well, but it's really obvious with the Relational Self). For example, classes start tomorrow and we now have 601 new students who can now define themselves as Champlain College students (which both expands and limits their sense of self), something they were not a year ago and something that will not mean the same thing ten years from now. And while the connection of "Death" to the Bodily, Reflective and Moral Selves seems natural, maybe it is most important in relation to the Relational Self. Marcel was most distressed by the death of Swann because it reminded him of his failure to keep a promise he had made to the dying Swann to go visit his daughter. Reading Swann's obituary, or for that matter almost anyone's obituary, it is obvious how clearly we are defined by our relationships to others. Soon, soon, all too soon, I will shuffle off this mortal coil and my obituary will report that I am an alumni from the doctoral program at the University of Cincinnati and that I was a member of the faculty at Champlain College for X years (probably 18) and that I was a participant in the Gentleman of Excellence, but it will not report that I was 6'4" and battled a bad hip for decades and the ways that my declining physical state influenced by decisions or that I routinely read Marcus Aurelius as a tool for personal reflection and the ways that it made me a better person and shaped my actions, and even if it shares that I was a member of the Islamic Society of Vermont it would not explain why. The problem, at least in my reckoning, is that the Relational Self is in many ways the most fleeting, and, naturally, Marcus Aurelius reminds us that soon you will have forgotten the world and the world will have forgotten you. I attended a Muslim funeral last year and one of the things that impressed me, and which I thought, oddly, were right and proper (probably I was thinking of Marcus Aurelius, as I always am), was that it had almost nothing to do with the person. Instead the attendees were instructed that if they wanted to help they should pay the late person's debts or support education, either of their children or more generally by setting up scholarships, and you could go on a hajj for them (but only if you had already gone for yourself). However, after saying all that, it is interesting that Proust included the famous line from Tacitus, "grande spatium mortalis aevi." A rough translation would be: "Great space for mortal life." That is, mortal life is short, but considering the potential to accomplish amazing things it is actually long. And thus we come to my conflicted view of life and death. I understood the Muslim funeral and I completely agree with Marcus Aurelius, but I also feel an intense, almost painful, desire to accomplish something of note before I exit stage left. Making peace with this struggle requires more self-analysis, obviously. For example, if I feel a need to finish my book (unpublished manuscript?) on the epics that is partially vanity, but it is also contributing, even if in a very small way, to the broader intellectual world. However, I've abandoned my idea of having my ashes spread in the Wadi Rum, because that was truly just vanity (although I'll still leave my funds and arrangements for my son to go to Jordan solely so that we can "share" one of my favorite places).
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