And though the Duke had no suspicion of this, there were aspects of his appearance, of his neck and cheeks and forehead, which suggested to the observer that the vital spirit within, compelled to clutch desperately at every passing minute, was buffeted by a great tragic gale, while the white wisps of his still magnificent but now sparse hair lashed with their foam the half submerged promontory of his face. And just as there are strange and unique reflections which only the approach of a supreme all-foundering storm can impart to rocks that hitherto have been of a different colour, so I realised that the leaded grey of the stiff, worn cheeks, the almost white, fleecy grey of the drifting wisps of hair, the feeble light that still shone from the eyes that scarcely saw, were no unreal hues and glimmers - they were only too real but they were fantastic, they were borrowed from the palette and the illumination, inimitable in their terrifying and prophetic sombreness, of old age and the imminence of death.
Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 1071
When looking at the notes in the margin I simply found this: "GS." Essentially, I was commenting on how closely this description matched me. There was a picture, well, a selfie, that the LBG took of the two of us on one of her visits to Vermont. I think we were down at the lake and she snapped a couple pictures, which I ran off an kept above my desk for the duration of our relationship. In the picture she was, as always, beautiful and sweet and goofy and bursting with life. And yet all I saw when I looked at myself was the equivalent of Proust's description above. I loved the picture, and still do, but it seemed all the time to haunt me because it presaged the doom of the relationship because I knew that she would eventually see what I saw.
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