déjeneur sur l´herbe

"In the past the fear of being no longer myself was something that had terrified me, and this had made me dread the end of each new love that I had experienced, because I could not bear the idea that the "I" who loved them would one day cease to exist, since this in itself would be a kind of death.  But by dint of repetition this fear had gradually been transformed into a calm confidence.  So that if in those early days, as we have seen, the idea of death had cast a shadow over my loves, for a long time the remembrance of love had helped me not to fear death. For I realized that dying was not something new, but on the contrary since my childhood I had already died many times.

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These successive deaths, so feared by the self which they were destined to annihilate, so painless, so indifferent once they were accomplished and the self that feared them was no longer there to feel them, had taught me by now that it would be the merest folly to be frightened of death. Yet it was precisely when the thought of death had become indifferent to me that I was beginning once more to fear death, under another form, it is true, as a threat not to myself but to my book, since for my book´s incubation this life that so many dangers threatened was for a while at least indispensable. Victor Hugo says:

Il faut que l´herbe pousse et que les enfants meurent.

To me it seems more correct to say that the cruel law of art is that people die and we ourselves die after exhausting every form of suffering, so that over our head may grow the grass not of oblivion, but of eternal life, the vigorous and luxuriant growth of a true work of art, and so that thither, gaily and without a thought for those who are sleeping, beneath them, future generations may come to enjoy their déjeneur sur l´herbe.

The past recaptured - Marcel Proust
Vintage Books, 1971