Proust, who was born in 1871,
lit up the Welt the clever Prussians won,
collapsing the belle époque in a bal de têtes*
on which we, its distant heirs, yet bet.
Ezra Pound, a babe born 1885,
il miglior fabro of much modern jive,
chose, however, to be a Blackshirt pet.
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,”*
odd though it is, not to survive,
but to grow elderly, then perish,
find happiness, or just accept one's fate
with a soupçon of sardonic relish.
Styles and fashions soon go out of date;
to change one's ways it never is too late.
Notes:
In Le Temps retrouvé, the final volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the characters’ senescent selves are portrayed attending a so-called bal de têtes, a masquerade ball in which only the head is disguised.
In 1900, after Marcel’s brother, the pioneering surgeon Robert Proust, published a paper on perineal prostatectomy, “De la prostatectomie périnéale totale,” witty Parisians dubbed the novel operation a proustatectomie.
*William Wordsworth, “The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement.”
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