The idea of death took up permanent residence within me in the way that love sometimes does. Not that I loved death, I abhorred it. But after a preliminary stage in which, no doubt, I thought about it from time to time as one does about a woman with whom one is not yet in love, its image adhered now to the most profound layer of my mind, so completely that I could not give my attention to anything without that thing first traversing the idea of death, and even if no object occupied my attention and I remained in a state of complete repose, the idea of death still kept me company as faithfully as the idea of my self. And, on that day on which I had become a half-dead man, I do not think that it was the accidents characterising this condition - my inability to walk downstairs, to remember a name, a get up from a chair - that had, even by an unconscious train of thought, given rise to this idea of death, this conviction that I was already almost dead, it seems to me rather that the idea had come simultaneously with the symptoms, that inevitably the mind, great mirror that it is, reflected a new reality. Yet still I did not see how from my present ailments one could pass, without warning of what was to come, to total death. Then, however, I thought of other people, of the countless people who die every day without the gap between their illness and their death seeming to us extraordinary. I thought also that it was only because I saw them from within - rather than because I saw them in the deceptive colours of hope - that certain of my ailments, taken singly, did not seem to me to be fatal although I believed that I would soon die, just as those who are most convinced that their hour has come are, nevertheless, easily persuaded that if they are unable to pronounced certain words, this is nothing so serious as asphasia or a stroke, but a symptom merely of a local fatigue of the tongue, or a nervous condition analogous to a stutter, or the lassitude which follows indigestion.
No doubt my books too, like my fleshly being, would in the end one day die. But death is a thing that we must resign ourselves to. We accept the thought that in ten years we ourselves, in a hundred years our books, will have ceased to exist. Eternal duration is promised no more to men's works than to men.
Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1100-1101
Proust finds himself fascinated with death, not because he loved it, far from it: "The idea of death took up permanent residence within me in the way that love sometimes does. Not that I loved death, I abhorred it." I think Proust had a much longer, and more stable relationship with death than he ever did with Albertine. He certainly understood death in a way that he never understood her, and he and death were certainly more faithful to each other. "But after a preliminary stage in which, no doubt, I thought about it from time to time as one does about a woman with whom one is not yet in love, its image adhered now to the most profound layer of my mind, so completely that I could not give my attention to anything without that thing first traversing the idea of death, and even if no object occupied my attention and I remained in a state of complete repose, the idea of death still kept me company as faithfully as the idea of my self." I keep coming back, not surprisingly, to the Sherwood Anderson chapter "Death" from Winesburg, Ohio.
It is very rare that I disagree with Proust, but I'm afraid I need to do so this time. Of course, I have the advantage of history on my side. He opines, "No doubt my books too, like my fleshly being, would in the end one day die. But death is a thing that we must resign ourselves to. We accept the thought that in ten years we ourselves, in a hundred years our books, will have ceased to exist. Eternal duration is promised no more to men's works than to men." It's a hundred years down the road and people are still reading (although, sadly, not as many as should be reading) Remembrance of Things Past, and that will still be true a thousand years from now. Granted, it will be in the rest of the world as we in the US get dumber and dumber by the day, and, who knows, Proust may end up on the wrong side of the burgeoning Trump police state (I wonder if anyone uses the hashtag #policestate on Twitter as much as I do?).
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