The Full Significance Of Words

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 the longest for longest in our life a purely abstract conception, looking at calendars, dating our letters, seeing our friends marry and then in turn the children of our friends, and yet, either from fear or from sloth, not understanding what all this means, until the day when we behold an unknown silhouette, like that of M. d'Argencourt, 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 treat as a contemporary of ours, smiles as though we were making fun of him because to him it seems that we are old enough to be his grandfather - and I began to understand too what death meant and love and the joys of the spiritual life, the usefulness of suffering, a vocation etc. For if names had lost most of their individuality for me, words on the other hand now began to reveal their true significance. The beauty of images is situated in front of things, that of ideas behind them. So that the first sort of beauty ceases to astonish us as soon as we have reached the things themselves, the second is something we understand only when we have passed beyond them.