My Years With Proust - Day 707

   And now I began to understand what old age was - old age, which perhaps of all the realities is the one of which we preserve for longest in our life a purely abstract conception, looking at calendars, dating our letters, seeing our friends marry and then in their turn the children of our friends, and yet, either from fear or from sloth, not understanding what all this means, until the day when we behold an unknown silhouette, like that of M. d'Argencourt, which teaches us that we are living in a new world; until the day when a grandson of a woman we once knew, a young man whom instinctively we treat as a contemporary of ours, smiles as though we were making fun of him because to him it seems that we are old enough to be his grandfather - and I began to understand too what death meant and love and the joys of the spiritual life, the usefulness of suffering, a vocation, etc.  For if names had lost most of their individuality for me, words on the other hand now began to reveal their full significance.  The beauty of images is situated in front of things, that of ideas behind them.  So that the first sort of beauty ceases to astonish us as soon as we have reached the things themselves, the second is something that we understand only when we have passed beyond them.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 973-974

For years I've discussed my impending old age and my passage to the transcendent state of being free of the carnal whirlwind.  However, something happened in that pantomime: I actually did grow old, or at least am well on my way   Proust tells us: "And now I began to understand what old age was - old age, which perhaps of all the realities is the one of which we preserve for longest in our life a purely abstract conception, looking at calendars, dating our letters, seeing our friends marry and then in their turn the children of our friends, and yet, either from fear or from sloth, not understanding what all this means, until the day when we behold an unknown silhouette . . ."  Old age is a "purely abstract concept" for the longest time until it becomes terribly tangible.  Oddly, or I suppose logically, it becomes tangible, in this case visible, when we become invisible.  I've pointed out that one of the things that surprised me at the beginning of my relationship with the LBG is that someone that young and that beautiful would desire me, let alone notice me.  Of course, I always assumed that even if we ended up together that I would pass into invisibility, even to her.  Now, years later, and years marked by my increasing invisibility, it seems strange - almost like a distant fairy tale - when it was different.

Proust also adds, "The beauty of images is situated in front of things, that of ideas behind them.  So that the first sort of beauty ceases to astonish us as soon as we have reached the things themselves, the second is something that we understand only when we have passed beyond them."  Maybe that's what we had left to use as we age, the beauty of the "ideas behind" the images.  If I'm free of the carnal whirlwind, or at least of one side of the carnal whirlwind, maybe I'll still play an active role in the intellectual whirlwind, the whirlwind of ideas.