My Years With Proust - Day 727

   But by a strange coincidence, this rational fear of danger was taking shape in my mind at a moment when I had finally become indifferent to the idea of death.  In the past the fear of being no longer myself was something that had terrified me, and this had made me dread the end of each new love that I had experienced (for Gilberte, for Albertine), because I could not bear the idea that the "I" who loved them would one day cease to exist, since this in itself would be a kind of death.  But by dint of repetition this fear had gradually been transformed into a calm confidence.  So that if in those early days, as we have seen, the idea of death had cast a shadow over my loves, for a long time now the remembrance of love had helped me not to fear death.  For I realised that dying was not something new, but that on the contrary since my childhood I had already died many times. To take a comparatively recent period, had I not clung to Albertine more tenaciously than to my own life?  Could I at the time when I loved her conceive my personality without the continued existence within it of my love for her?  Yet now I no longer loved her, I was no longer the person who loved her but a different person who did not love her, and it was when I had become a new person that I had ceased to love her.  And yet I did not suffer from having become this new person, from no longer loving Albertine, and surely the prospect of one day no longer having a body could not from any point of view seem to me as sad as had then seemed to me that of one day no longer loving Albertine, that prospect which now was a fact and one which left me quite unmoved.  These successive deaths, so feared by the self which they were destined to annihilate, so painless, so unimportant once they were accomplished and the self that feared was no longer there to feel them, had taught me by now that it would be the merest folly to be frightened of death.  Yet it was precisely when the thought of death had become a matter of indifference to me that I was beginning once more to fear death, under another name, it is true, as a threat not to myself but to my book, since for my book's incubation this life that so many dangers threatened was for a while at least indispensable.  Victor Hugo says:

Il faut que l'herbe pousse et que les enfants meurent.

To me it seems more correct to say that the cruel law of art is that people die and we ourselves die after exhausting every form of suffering, so that over our heads may grow the grass not of oblivion but of eternal life, the vigorous and luxuriant growth of a true work of art, so that thither, gaily and without a thought for those who are sleeping beneath them, future generations may come to enjoy their dejeuner sur l'herbe.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1094-1095

As Proust decides to undertake the writing of his novel he understands that his poor health, and Time itself, may keep him from completing his quest.  He discovers that he is not afraid of death as an end, but rather death as something that would keep him from finishing his novel.  Proust tells us, "But by a strange coincidence, this rational fear of danger was taking shape in my mind at a moment when I had finally become indifferent to the idea of death.  In the past the fear of being no longer myself was something that had terrified me, and this had made me dread the end of each new love that I had experienced (for Gilberte, for Albertine), because I could not bear the idea that the "I" who loved them would one day cease to exist, since this in itself would be a kind of death." There are simply things that are far more horrible than death, and for Proust the worst option was to not finish writing Remembrance of Things Past.

When I reread Proust's words I can only think of the ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian who, in his writings, had unintentionally insulted the emperor, and was ordered to be castrated.  Since this was a shameful (and obviously extraordinarily painful) punishment it was essentially an unofficial order for him to commit suicide.  Instead, Sima Qian accepted the castration so that he could finish his history of early China (which, by the way, is required reading, not only because it is interesting, but also because he takes time out at the end of every chapter to include some insightful analysis on what it all means).  In explaining his decision Sima Qian wrote, "A man has only one death.  That death may be as weighty as Mount Tai, or it may be as light as a goose feather.  It all depends upon the way he uses it . . . It is the nature of every man to love life and hate death, to think of his relatives and look after his wife and children.  Only when a man is moved by higher principles as this not so.  Then there are things that he must do . . . The brave man does not always die for honor, while even the coward may fulfill his duty.  Each takes a different way to exert himself.  Thought I might be weak and cowardly and seek shamefully to prolong my life, yet I know full well the difference between what ought to be followed and what rejected.  How could I bring myself to sink into the shame of ropes and bonds?  If even the lowest slave and scullery maid can bear to commit suicide, why should not one like myself be able to do what has to be done?  But the reason I have not refused to bear these ills and continued to live, dwelling among this filth, is that I grieve that I have things in my heart that I have not been able to express fully, and I am shamed to think that after I am gone my writings will not be known to posterity."

In addition, Proust writes, "For I realised that dying was not something new, but that on the contrary since my childhood I had already died many times." In COR 110 we talk about identity and how we create, destroy and recreate ourselves many times in the course of a lifetime.  Certainly the women we love come and go, and the death of each love affair brings its own death of the self.  I have trouble believing that in the end the death of my bodily self will be as painful as the death of my marriage. "To me it seems more correct to say that the cruel law of art is that people die and we ourselves die after exhausting every form of suffering, so that over our heads may grow the grass not of oblivion but of eternal life, the vigorous and luxuriant growth of a true work of art, so that thither, gaily and without a thought for those who are sleeping beneath them, future generations may come to enjoy their dejeuner sur l'herbe."

Proust quotes a Victor Hugo's line, "Il faut que l'herbe pousse et que les enfants meurent," which translates out as (and thanks for my excellent friend Sanford Zale for the translation) "grass has to grow and children have to die."  It's from a long poem that Hugo wrote on the banks of the Seine where his nineteen year old daughter had drown.  I was quite taken by the beauty, and sadness, of the poem so I transcribed the first half:

Now that Paris, its cobblestones and marble,
and its mists and its roofs are quite far from my eyes;
now that I am under tree branches,
and can daydream of the beauty of the skies;

Now that I am coming out, pale but victorious,
from the mourning that made my soul dark,
and I feel the peace of great Nature
entering my heart;

Now that, seated at the edge of the waves,
moved by this superb and tranquil horizon,
I can examine deep truths inside me
and look at the flowers that are on the lawn;

Now, O God! that I have the somber calm
to be able from now
to look with eyes on the stone where I know in the shadow
she is sleeping forever;

Now that, touched by these divine sights,
Plains, forests, rocks, little valleys, silvery river,
seeing my smallness and seeing your miracles,
I come back to my senses before their immensity;

I came to you, Lord, father who must be believed in;
peaceful now, I bring you
the pieces of my heart all full of your glory
that you broke;

I came to you, Lord! confessing that you are
good, merciful, indulgent and kind, O living God!
I admit that you alone know what you do.
And that man is nothing but a reed that quivers in the wind;

I say that the tomb that closes upon the dead
opens the heavens;
and that what we here below take for the end
is the beginning;

I acknowledge on my knees that you alone, awesome father,
own the infinite, the real, the absolute;
I acknowledge that it is good, that it is right
that my heart had bled, since god willed it!

I resist no more whatever happens to me
by your will.
The soul from grief to grief, Man from shore to shore,
rolls to eternity.

We never see but a single side of things;
the other plunges into the night of frightening mystery.
Man bears the yoke without knowing why.
All he sees is short, useless and fleeting.

You make loneliness return always
around all his footsteps.
You did not want him to have certainty
nor joy here below!

As soon as he owns something, fate takes it away.
Nothing is given to him, in his speedy days,
for him to make a home and say:
Here is my house, my field and my loved ones!

He must see for a short time all that his eyes see;
he grows old without support.
Since things are so, it's because they must be so;
I admit it, I admit it!

The world is dark, O God! the unchanging harmony
is wrought of tears as well as of songs;
Man Is but an atom in his infinite shadow,
night where the good rise, where the bad fall.

I know you have far more to do
than to feel sorry for us all,
and that a child who dies, to its mother's despair,
is nothing to you!

I know that fruit falls to the wind that shakes it,
that birds lose their feathers and flowers their fragrance,
that Creation is a great wheel
that cannot move without crushing someone;

months, days, billows of the sea, eyes that weep
pass under the sky;
grass must grow and children die;
I know it, O God! . . .