Finding Time Again: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 7 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Marcel Proust

When in a few minutes I made my way home through the Champs-Élysées, who was to say that I would not be struck down by the same illness as my grandmother, one afternoon when she had gone there with me for a walk which was to be her last, although she had no suspicion, such is the ignorance in which we live, that the hand of the clock had, unawares, arrived at the point when the clenched spring of the clockwork was to strike the hour? Perhaps the fear of having already lived through almost the whole of the minute which precedes the first stroke of that hour, when it is already being prepared, perhaps this fear of the stroke that was about to toll in my brain, was like a shadowy recognition of what was about to occur, like a reflection in consciousness of the precarious state of the brain when its arteries are about to give up, something which is no more impossible than the sudden acceptance of death by men who have been wounded and who, although still lucid, when both the doctor and their desire to live attempt to mislead them, say, as they see what is about to happen: “I’m going to die, I’m ready,” and write their farewells to their wife.