My Years With Proust - Day 669

But in spite of this, life continued almost unchanged for many of these who have played a part in this story, and not least for M. de Charlus and the Verdurins, just as if the Germans had not been as near them as they were, since the threat of a danger momentarily checked but permanently alive leaves us absolutely indifferent if we do not picture it to ourselves.  People, as they go about their pleasures, do not normally stop to think that, if certain moderating and weakening influences should happen to be suspended, the proliferation of infusoria would attain its maximum theoretical rate and after a very few days the organisms that might have been contained in a cubic millimetre would take a leap of many millions of miles and become a mass a million times greater than the sun, having in the process destroyed all our oxygen and all the substances on which we live, so that there would exist neither humanity nor animals nor earth, nor do they reflect that an irremediable and by no means improbable catastrophe may one day be generated in the ether by the incessant and frenzied activity which lies behind the apparent immutability of the sun; they busy themselves with their own affairs without thinking about these two worlds, the one too small, the other too late for us to be aware of the cosmic menaces with which they envelop us. 

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 796

Wow, thinks Marcel Proust, for giving me something else to worry about . . .

Of course, Proust's point is, as usual, spot on.  We float through life with very little sense of the impending disasters surrounding us at any one time or another: expanding infusoria or rogue comets or texting drivers or junior faculty.  Instead, either consciously or unconsciously, we create false problems to fill our time and distract our senses.  Sometimes it is imposed from above, such as our mad king Trump trying to promote racism and Islamophobia to distract us from the very real class war being waged by the 1%.  However, we're also quite capable of creating our own false terrors to distract us from the very real ones.  Proust tells us this to remind us that despite the war, and the presence of the invading Germans, most of the characters populating the novel (and here he sounds like Dickens) are surviving without a second thought of the dangers surrounding them.