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

by Marcel Proust

If the idea of death during this period had, as we have seen, cast a gloom over love, the memory of love had for a long time now helped me not to be afraid of death. For I understood that dying was not something new but quite the reverse, that since my childhood I had already died a number of times. To take the most recent period, had I not been more attached to Albertine than to my life? Could I conceive of my personality, then, without my love for her continuing? Now that I no longer loved her, I was no longer the being who loved her, but a different being who did not love her, I had stopped loving her when I became somebody else. But there was no suffering involved in becoming this other person, in not loving Albertine any longer; and certainly some day not having my body any longer could not possibly seem as sad, from any point of view, as not loving Albertine one day had once seemed to be. And yet, how little I cared now about not loving her! These successive deaths, so feared by the self they were doomed to annihilate, so meaningless, so gentle after they had happened and when the person who was afraid of them was no longer there to feel them, had enabled me for some time now to understand how unwise it would be to be frightened of death. But it was now that I had been indifferent to it for a while that I was starting to fear it again, although in a different form, not for myself but for my book, for the birth of which this life of mine threatened by so many dangers ...