Sacrifice, Death, and Resurrection

  Below is an example of how Proust took the process of death and resurrection as an almost literal metaphor for the constant dynamics of life; the painful overcoming of selves that give birth to new ones, as we go throughout the years:

 "And for a neurotic nature such as mine, the anxiety and alarm which I felt as I lay beneath that strange and too lofty ceiling were but the protest of an affection that survived in me for a ceiling that was familiar and low. Doubtless, this affection too would disappear, and another having taken its place (when death, and then another life, had, in the guise of Habit, performed their double task); but until its annihilation, every night it would suffer afresh and on this first night especially..."