Toward the end of Proust’s Time Regained (volume 7 of his novel In Search of Lost Time), Marcel, the narrator, upon returning from the sanatorium in Paris where he spent several years, is invited to an afternoon reception at the home of the Duc de Guermantes. Marcel is astonished to be reunited with people he hasn’t seen in ages, as everyone, including the master of the house, looks completely changed, made up with “generally powdered” faces as though they’re taking part in a play or a masked ball. The “mask” is the face of old age, a consequence of time. “The heads have been in the making for a long time without their wishing it and cannot be got rid of by toilet operations when the party is over.”¹

      Passing time, or the years we live through, inevitably leaves its mark on us. In his novel, Proust metaphorically translates time, which can’t be seen with the eyes or felt with the hands, through the physical reality of the body. That is the notion of the “embodiment of Time” stressed by the author on the last page. In other words, the times past, through which we have lived, stay accumulated in our bodies, never taken from us—“after death Time leaves the body.” Proust translates the way time is internalized in our bodies in terms of depth and height, not width and volume.

      Amid the “masked ball,” Marcel hears the sound of the bell he heard decades before as a child—the “metallic, shrill, fresh echo of the little bell” on the gate at the end of the yard in his old home in Combray, which rang as Marcel’s parents showed out Mr. Swan, a neighbor, finally leaving after a long evening of conversation. Decades and countless events stand between that moment and the day of the party at the home of the Duc de Guermantes, but the sound remains unchanged. To hear it more clearly, more closely, Marcel must make an effort to withdraw from the conversations among the “masks” around him and “plunge into” himself to grasp the vivid memories they bring forth. The sound, then, exists deep inside his body, intact as ever, and all the past moments that lie between the moment the sound was heard and the present moment exist in that deep space within. So all he has to do to recapture the past moment, or return to it, is plunge “more deeply into” himself. Marcel says, “I had a feeling of intense fatigue when I realized that all this span of time had not only been lived, thought, secreted by me uninterruptedly, that it was my life, that it was myself, but more still because I had at every moment to keep it attached to myself, that it bore me up, that I was poised on its dizzy summit, that I could not move without taking it with me . . . I was giddy at seeing so many years below and in me as though I were leagues high.”

      The giddiness he feels at the pinnacle of time takes on a more concrete form in the person of the aged Duc de Guermantes. 

      “I now understood why the Duc de Guermantes, whom I admired when he was seated because he had aged so little although he had so many more years under him than I, had tottered when he got up and wanted to stand erect—like those old Archbishops surrounded by acolytes, whose only solid part is their metal cross—and had moved, trembling like a leaf on the hardly approachable summit of his eighty-three years, as though men were perched upon living stilts which keep on growing, reaching the height of church-towers, until walking becomes difficult and dangerous and, at last, they fall.”

      “Eighty-three.” Yes. This year, I turned the same age as the Duc de Guermantes or the old Archbishops as described by Proust. I’m as old as U.S. President Joe Biden, the former Korean President Lee Myung-bak, the deceased Lee Kun-hee, former chairman of Samsung, and Kim Jong Il, the also deceased former leader of North Korea. President Biden, who tripped and fell in front of the eyes of the world, conceded his candidacy for a second term to the younger Vice President Kamala Harris in the end.

      I, too, who had been confident of my relatively good health, recently slipped on hard cement ground while on a long walk along the banks of the Han River and slightly injured my tailbone. Anyone well into old age eventually faces a moment when they reel from vertigo, as if standing on stilts, clumsily trying to look down at the ground. Two days ago, I returned from a trip overseas, during which I walked for six hours along a 20-kilometer wooden path over a swamp surrounded by yellow autumn grass. 

*

At what age do people belong to the “aged” group? This is a highly subjective judgment, but also a social issue in communities, in which people are seen through an “objective” standard. In today’s industrial society, most working people over age 65 are considered “old” and forced to retire. This is the age at which senior citizens in Korea become officially eligible for free subway rides, a benefit provided by the government. In general, human motor nerves are most sensitive and quick to respond around age 25. After age 30, however, the body’s structure begins to degenerate. On a personal level, my physical deterioration was detected early on, as I’ve suffered from myopia and astigmatism since my youth, and had to deal with diminished hearing, tooth wear, and memory loss beginning in my late 60s. Such decline is inevitable for all who are born into life, for it has been our fate at all points of history.

      The advancement of medicine and technology, however, has made it possible to correct deficiencies in physical function, thanks to which I have been able to carry on with daily life and work even after my retirement at 65 without too much trouble. One day, I got on a subway train and the young woman sitting in front of me jumped to her feet and yielded her seat, saying, “Sir!” For the first time in my life, I became objectively aware of my old age; it was long after I had retired from work.

      The “2023 Survey on the Aged,” conducted by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, reveals surprising results. Based on the responses of 10,078 citizens over age 65, it showed that the average age at which people saw themselves as old was 71.6—1.1 years older than the 70.5 reported in 2020. Thirty-nine percent of senior citizens seek to continue working after retirement, and the proportion of such people increases each year. This shift relates to the phenomenon of longer life expectancy. According to the population mortality table released by Statistics Korea, the average life expectancy of people in Korea in 2022 was 79.9 for men and 85.6 for women. By the UN’s count, however, the life expectancy of South Korean babies born in 2023 was 84.33 on average for both males and females, ranking it among top three among 210 countries around the world, an eight-level increase compared to the life expectancy in 2022 (82.73, 11th in ranking). 

      If life expectancy is a quantitative indicator of good health, healthy life expectancy is qualitative. Healthy life expectancy, which excludes years of inactivity due to disease or injury, indicates how long a person is expected to live in good health. The average healthy life expectancy for Koreans has increased by 5.9 years, from 66.6 in 2000 to 72.5 in 2021—a positive development for individuals. But for society, this increase, driven by low birth rates and a rapidly aging population, presents a heavy burden. A report by Korea Development Institute predicts that if the legal age for senior citizens remains unchanged at 65, the elderly care expenses in Korea will be the highest among OECD nations by 2054. Elderly people over age 65 make up 19.2 percent of Korea’s total population of 51 million, or roughly 10 million people. In South Jeolla and North Gyeongsang provinces, the aged account for 25-26 percent of the total population. As Simone de Beauvoir somberly pointed out half a century ago in her book, Old Age: “The insouciance hiding itself behind sundry myths of increase and abundance treats the aged as the lowest class of people. France has the highest old age population in the world, with 12 percent of the total population being 65 or older. And yet the aged have been sentenced to poverty, loneliness, disability, and despair.” Fifty years later, then, with the elderly population twice as high, what fate are the aged in Korea sentenced to?

      François Mauriac, the novelist, has stated: “Old age is great, what a pity it ends so badly!” The end he refers to is aging and death. “Old age. It’s the only disease that you don’t look forward to being cured of,” said Orson Welles. Humans, strictly speaking, are all prisoners sentenced to death. We just don’t know when the sentence will be executed. On a social level, aging and death call up the issues of senior care and funeral arrangements. A recent news report indicated that as a result of a low birth rate and aging, facilities like nurseries, preschools, and even postnatal care centers are turning into centers for the elderly, such as long-term care facilities. Around the same time, the same newspaper ran an article titled “Crematoriums Keeping the Country from Turning into a Cemetery Filled to Capacity . . . Ashes Scattered over Mountains and Sea.” As funeral customs in Korea began to change in the mid-90s, with more and more people opting for cremation (93 percent of all funeral options chosen today), memorial parks equipped with enshrinement facilities like charnel houses have been on the increase. Such facilities, however, come with contract expiration dates—15, 30, or 45 years at the longest—meaning that even the deceased may need to “move out” once a lease expires and find a new place of enshrinement.

*

So many things have changed, indeed. I grew up thinking that a funeral consisted of courteous visits by relatives, neighbors, and acquaintances at the home of the deceased, a long funeral march with a bier carrying the corpse to be buried in the family burial grounds. In my life, the funerals of my parents and grandparents were conducted in this manner. But caring for family gravesites became increasingly difficult with the passing of time and people growing used to life in big cities. The challenge now is to deal with these changes. A matter of similar import is my own funeral. The most important principle is my attitude on my own life and death. My life has been one of learning, reading, and writing, which has allowed me plenty of time to ponder life and death. But I have yet to know what death is. I have only seen and felt and thought about the death of others, outside of my own body and mind. I can’t experience my own death or attend my own funeral. I can, however, imagine the final moment leading up to death.

      Michel Tournier contemplated two ways of dealing with death: “In the past, someone facing death knew that he was dying. He would call his family to his bedside and tell them something meaningful, like La Fontaine’s fables. Today, when someone is approaching death, he is carried to the hospital and placed in a glass box for a long time at the order of people in white gowns, barely maintaining his existence through rubber hoses and syringes” (Petites proses). Today, I dare not hope for the good fortune of a death like one in La Fontaine’s fables; it’s far more likely my end will follow the course of the latter. My father, however, died one day while I was living abroad, as he made ready to leave the house and stepped out onto the wood maru. The cause was a heart attack. A large Chinese character, 雪, meaning “snow,” was written in thin, shaky strokes on the day’s page of the desk calendar on the chest of drawers in his room. Hong Yunsuk, a poet and my mother-in-law, went to bed at night as usual and passed away quietly the next morning. On that sunny autumn morning, her caregiver had unexpectedly called me: “She’s not breathing.” How wonderful it would be if my last moment were so simple! After age gives way to death, the only traces of a person left in the world are the tomb and the tombstone. Nothing remains, of course, after the ashes are scattered over a mountain or sea. I wouldn’t mind if, one day, my own ashes were scattered to the wind, leaving nothing behind. I’ve seen countless tombs and tombstones as I traveled around the world. I’ve passed by those of my ancestors in the mountains back home, and those of renowned writers such as Paul Valéry, the author of “The Graveyard by the Sea,” in Sète in the South of France. The one that’s stayed with me the longest is the unadorned tombstone of the poet W. B. Yeats, which I came upon in a churchyard in Ireland. The pithy words engraved thereon admonished me to be on my way: “Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by!” The small and simple granite stone of Albert Camus’s tomb, in a graveyard in the little town of Lourmarin in Provence, showed nothing but the writer’s name and the dates of his birth and death.

      When Michel Tournier, born in 1924, was asked, “What will be the most important event to take place in 2000?” he replied without hesitation, “My death.” Then he explained why: “Because I’ll be 76. My father died at that age. Just as his father did. It’s a good age to die. You can avoid the pain and disgrace of old age, without losing your good fortune and reason. And damn, wouldn’t it have been a long enough life?” He had his epitaph written out in advance: “Michel Tournier (1924-2000). I adored you, and you returned my love a hundredfold. Life, I thank you!” (Petites proses). Two years later, in March 2002, I paid him a visit at his home in Choiseul, a village near Paris. He was still on the panel of judges for Prix Goncourt. At 78, he had a face full of wrinkles and walked with a limp. I subtly congratulated him on already reaching his second year beyond the age he was supposed to leave this world. He replied, “Oh, good heavens! I missed my own death!” On January 18, 2016, he died at his home in Choiseul, aged 92. He’d always praised Victor Hugo in his old age and loved to recite one of Hugo’s poems, “Boaz Asleep”:

            Life’s primal source, unchangeable and bright, 

            The old man entereth, the day eterne; 

            And in the young man’s eye a flame may burn, 

            But in the old man’s eye one seeth light.              

Translated by Yewon Jung

Kim Hwa-Young is a literary critic, translator of French literature, and recipient of the Palbong Literary Criticism Award and Inchon Award. He has published more than twenty books of criticism, including A Study on Literary Imagination, On the Poems of Midang Seo Jeong-ju, The Shock of Happiness, and A Walk with French Literature. He has translated more than 110 works, including The Stranger, Madame Bovary, Fruits of the Earth, and Strait Is the Gate. 
 

[1] The version quoted in this essay is the translation by Terence Kilmartin (Jovian Press, 2018).