My Years With Proust - Day 678

   He must have been truly magnificent in those last hours.  The man who throughout his life, even when sitting down, even when walking across a drawing-room, had seemed to be restraining an impulse to charge, while with a smile he dissembled the indomitable will which dwelt within his triangular head, at last had charged.  Freed from the books which encumbered it, the feudal turret had become military once more.  And this Guermantes had died more himself than ever before, or rather more a member of his race, into which slowly he dissolved until he became nothing more than a Guermantes, as was symbolically visible at his burial in the church of Saint-Hilaire at Combray, completely hung for the occasion with black draperies upon which stood out in red, beneath the closed circle of the coronet, without initials or Christian names or titles, the G of the Guermantes that he had again in death become.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 881-882

"He must have been truly magnificent in those last hours."  Marcel reflects upon the end of his best friend Robert de Saint-Loup  who had just died on the front during World War I.  I think we all, in our romantic fashion, dream of a heroic ending, hopefully for our friends, but at least for ourselves.  Marcus Aurelius reminds us, quite rightly, that soon we will have forgotten the world and the world will have forgotten us, but still we stubbornly adhere to the dream of an appropriately stirring end.  I spent the morning talking to my first year students about, among other things, narrative, and maybe our desire to go out with a bang instead of a whimper is a reflection of our desire to control the narrative of our life; as if the final few moments will somehow give meaning to the decades of mediocrity that preceded it.  Or maybe we just want to be remembered (although I guess that's part of the narrative) for being intellectually sharp if not necessarily young and beautiful at the end, and not hooked to a machine.  All things considered, I suppose I would like to be remembered as the "man who throughout his life, even when sitting down, even when walking across a drawing-room, had seemed to be restraining an impulse to charge . . ."