Of time and old age
308 .. who, when I spoke of' an old man like myself in the hope of being contradicted, showed in their answering looks, which saw me not as they saw themselves but as I saw them, not a glimmer of protest. For we failed to see our own appearance, our own age, but each one of us, as though it were a mirror that faced him, saw those of the others... Old age in this respect is like death. Some men confront them both with indifference, not because they have more courage than others but because they have less imagination.
313 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, whether from fear or from sloth, not understanding what all this means, until the day we behold an unknown silhouette.., 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 try to treat as an equal companion, smiles as though we were making fun of him because to him it seems that we are old enough to be his grandfather .... 315 Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin She had not noticed the disfigurement which offended my eyes which was merely one of the masks in the collection of Time, a mask which Time had fastened to the face of the Marquis, but gradually, adding layer to layer slowly so that his wife had perceived nothing. 334 The balancing mechanism of Time For the fact is that there is no humiliation so great that one should not accept it with unconcern, knowing that at the end of a few years our misdeeds will be no more than an invisible dust buried beneath the smiling and blooming peace of nature. The man whose reputation is momentarily under a cloud will soon find himself, thanks to the balancing mechanism of Time, caught and held between 2 new social levels which have for him nothing but deference and admiration. 356 An instantaneous snapshot For although we know that the years pass, and youth gives way to old age, that fortunes and thrones crumble.. and that fame is transitory, the manner m which - by means of a sort of instantaneous photograph - we take cognisance of this moving universe whirled along by Time, has the contrary effect of immobilising it. And the result is that we see as always young the men and women whom we have known young, that those who we have known old we retrospectively endow in the past with the virtues of old age, that we trust unreservedly in the credit of a millionaire and the influence of a reigning monarch, knowing with our reason, though we do not effectively believe, that tomorrow both the one and the other may be fugitives stripped of all power. ... (T)his ignorance of people's true social position (which) every ten years causes the new fashionable elect to arise in all the glory of the moment as though the past had never existed.. 371 Oblivion at work within us .. the modification in the ideas which they possessed of one another.. The reason was that people - and in saying 'people' I mean 'what people are for us' - do not in our memory possess the unvariability of a figure in a painting. Oblivion is at work within us, and according to its arbitrary operation they evolve. Sometimes it even happens that after a time we confuse one person for another. 387 Sterile social contacts precluding penetration beneath the surface What use would it have been that, for a few more years, I should waste hour after hour at evening parties pursuing the scarce expired echo of other people's remarks with the no less vain and fleeting sound of my own, for the sterile pleasure of a social contact which precluded all penetration beneath the surface? 395-6 Crystallisation upon crystallisation If in a period of twenty years, like this that had elapsed since my first entry into society, the conglomeration of social groups had disintegrated and re-formed under the magnetic influence of new stars destined themselves also to fade away and then to reappear, the same sequence of crystallisation followed by dissolution and again by a fresh crystallisation might have been observed to place in the consciousness of individuals. 411 Ageing writers give up their talent .. even the best writers cease often, at the approach of old age or after producing too much, to have any talent… 422 The vestiges of survival after death Yes, I recalled the fact, for, long after our poor friends have lost their place in our hearts, their unvalued dust continues to be mingled, like some base alloy, with the circumstances of the past. And though we no longer love them, it may happen that in speaking of a room, or a walk in a public park, or a country road where they were present on a certain occasion, we are obliged, so that the place where they occupied may not be left empty, to make allusion to them, without, however, regretting them, without even naming them or permitting others to identify them. Such are the last, the scarcely desirable vestiges of survival after death. 432 The pattern of this world is constantly being refashioned Thus it is that the pattern of this world changes, that centres of empire, assessments of wealth, letters patent of social |
prestige, all that seemed to be forever fixed is constantly being refashioned, so that the eyes of a man who has lived can contemplate the most total transformation exactly where change could have seemed to him to be most impossible.
433 The fading attributes of old men The sight of old men grows dim as their hearing grows less acute, their insight too becomes clouded and even their vigilance is relaxed by fatigue, and at a certain age, inevitably, Jupiter himself is transformed into a character in one of Molière’s plays, and not even into the Olympian lover of Alcmene but into a ludicrous Geronte. 446-7 Cross-roads in a forest Was she not - are not, indeed the majority of human beings? - like one of those star-shaped cross-roads in a forest where roads converge that have come, in the forest as in our lives, from the most diverse quarters? 448-9 But the truth, even more, is that life is perpetually weaving fresh threads which link one individual and one event to another, and that these threads are crossed and recrossed, doubled and redoubled to thicken the web, so that between any slightest point of our past and all the others a rich network of memories gives us an almost infinite variety of communicating paths to choose from. 455 The night is at hand and no dawn will follow But my memory was old and tired. The mind has landscapes which it is allowed to contemplate only for a certain space of time. In my life I had been like a painter climbing a road high above a lake, a view of which is denied to him by a curtain of rocks and trees. Suddenly through a gap ill the curtain he sees the lake, its whole expanse is before him, he takes up his brushes. But already the night is at hand, the night which will put an end to his painting and which no dawn will follow. 458 My brain an unquarried repository of valuable minerals I knew that my brain was like a mountain landscape rich in minerals, wherein lay vast and varied ores of great price. But should I have time to exploit them? For two reasons I was the only person who could do this: with my death would disappear the one and only engineer who possessed the skill to extract these minerals and - more than that - the geological formation itself. 458-9 Since my childhood I have already died many times For I realized that dying was not something new, but that on the contrary since my childhood I had already died many times. .. Could I at the time when I loved her conceive my personality without the continued existence within it of my love for her (Albertine)? 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. 461 Those barbarian festivals we call dinner parties I was in the condition of those old men who one day are in full possession of their faculties and the next, having broken a thigh or had an attack: of indigestion, can only drag on for a while in their bed an existence which has become nothing more than a preparation, longer or shorter, (462) for a now ineluctable death. One of my selves, the one which in the past had been in the habit of going to those barbarian festivals that we call dinner parties .. 471 .. The peal of the bell on the garden gate with me all along .. all the events which were ranged in an unbroken series between the moment of my childhood when I had first heard its sound (the peal of the bell on the garden gate as Swann departed) and the Guermantes party (472). Its peal had always been there, inside me, and not this sound only but also, between that distant moment and the present one, unrolled in all its vast length, the whole of that past which I was not aware that I carried about within me… there must have been no break in continuity, no single second at which I had ceased or rested from existing, from thinking, from being conscious of myself, since that moment from long ago still adhered to me and I could still find it again, could retrace my steps to it merely by descending to a greater depth within myself. 473-4 .. Touching epochs immoderately prolonged and immensely far apart in the Dimension of Time I should not fail.. to describe men first and foremost as occupying a place, a very considerable place compared with the restricted one which is allotted to them in space, a place on the contrary immoderately prolonged – for simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch epochs that are immensely far apart, separated by the slow accretion of many, many days – in the dimension of Time. 431 .. Old age the most miserable of human conditions One saw that old age, which is after all the most miserable of human conditions, which more than anything else precipitates us from the summit of our fortunes like a king in a Greek tragedy, old age, forcing him to halt in the via dolorosa which life must become for us when we are impotent and surrounded by menace, .. old age, giving him, though he did not know it, the air of gently and timidly beseeching those near him, if it had made him august, had, even more, made him humbly suppliant. |
And finally,
The Two Ways come together: the Méséglise (Swann’s) Way and the Guermantes way; the self we are born with and the individual we become; the bourgeois society into which Marcel was born and the aristocratic circle which accepted him. All ways are interconnected and from a perspective outside Time. Marcel now understands the meaning and purpose of his life, he recognises his talents and determines to start writing just as the narrator brings his own story to a close.
The Two Ways come together: the Méséglise (Swann’s) Way and the Guermantes way; the self we are born with and the individual we become; the bourgeois society into which Marcel was born and the aristocratic circle which accepted him. All ways are interconnected and from a perspective outside Time. Marcel now understands the meaning and purpose of his life, he recognises his talents and determines to start writing just as the narrator brings his own story to a close.