The Prisoner: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Marcel Proust

He had a further stroke, rolled off the sofa on to the ground as all the visitors and guards came running up. He was dead. Dead for ever? Who can say? Certainly spiritualist experiments provide no more proof than religious dogma of the soul’s survival. What we can say is that everything in our life happens as if we entered it bearing a burden of obligations contracted in an earlier life; there is nothing in the conditions of our life on this earth to make us feel any obligation to do good, to be scrupulous, even to be polite, nor to make the unbelieving artist feel compelled to paint a single passage twenty times over, when the admiration it will excite will be of little importance to his body when it is eaten by the worms, like the little piece of yellow wall painted with such knowledge and such refinement by the never-to-be-known artist whom we have barely identified by the name of Vermeer. All these obligations which do not derive their force from the here-and-now seem to belong to a different world founded on goodness, conscientiousness, sacrifice, a world quite different from this one, which we leave to be born on to this earth, and to which we shall perhaps return, to live under those unknown laws which we have obeyed because we carried their teaching within us without knowing who had written it there, these laws to which we are brought closer by any profound work of the intellect, and which are invisible—if ever wholly invisible—only to fools. So that the idea that ...