In Search of Lost Time

When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours,

      the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Instinctively,

      when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own

      position on the earth's surface and the amount of time that has elapsed

      during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused,

      and to break its ranks. Suppose that, towards morning, after a night of

      insomnia, sleep descends upon him while he is reading, in quite a

      different position from that in which he normally goes to sleep, he has

      only to lift his arm to arrest the sun and turn it back in its course,

      and, at the moment of waking, he will have no idea of the time, but will

      conclude that he has just gone to bed. Or suppose that he gets drowsy in

      some even more abnormal position; sitting in an armchair, say, after

      dinner: then the world will fall topsy-turvy from its orbit, the magic

      chair will carry him at full speed through time and space, and when he

      opens his eyes again he will imagine that he went to sleep months earlier

      and in some far distant country. But for me it was enough if, in my own

      bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for

      then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when

      I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first

      who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may

      lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal's consciousness; I was more

      destitute of human qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the memory,

      not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I

      had lived, and might now very possibly be, would come like a rope let down

      from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I

      could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse and

      surmount centuries of civilisation, and out of a half-visualised

      succession of oil-lamps, followed by shirts with turned-down collars,

      would put together by degrees the component parts of my ego.

      Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them

      by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by

      the immobility of our conceptions of them. For it always happened that

      when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt

      to discover where I was, everything would be moving round me through the

      darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to

      move, would make an effort to construe the form which its tiredness took

      as an orientation of its various members, so as to induce from that where

      the wall lay and the furniture stood, to piece together and to give a name

      to the house in which it must be living. Its memory, the composite memory

      of its ribs, knees, and shoulder-blades offered it a whole series of rooms

      in which it had at one time or another slept; while the unseen walls kept

      changing, adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it

      remembered, whirling madly through the darkness. And even before my brain,

      lingering in consideration of when things had happened and of what they

      had looked like, had collected sufficient impressions to enable it to

      identify the room, it, my body, would recall from each room in succession

      what the bed was like, where the doors were, how daylight came in at the

      windows, whether there was a passage outside, what I had had in my mind

      when I went to sleep, and had found there when I awoke. The stiffened side

      underneath my body would, for instance, in trying to fix its position,

      imagine itself to be lying, face to the wall, in a big bed with a canopy;

      and at once I would say to myself, "Why, I must have gone to sleep after

      all, and Mamma never came to say good night!" for I was in the country

      with my grandfather, who died years ago; and my body, the side upon which

      I was lying, loyally preserving from the past an impression which my mind

      should never have forgotten, brought back before my eyes the glimmering

      flame of the night-light in its bowl of Bohemian glass, shaped like an urn

      and hung by chains from the ceiling, and the chimney-piece of Siena marble

      in my bedroom at Combray, in my great-aunt's house, in those far distant

      days which, at the moment of waking, seemed present without being clearly

      penned, but would become plainer in a little while when I was properly

      awake.

      Then would come up the memory of a fresh position; the wall slid away in

      another direction; I was in my room in Mme. de Saint-Loup's house in the

      country; good heavens, it must be ten o'clock, they will have finished

      dinner! I must have overslept myself, in the little nap which I always

      take when I come in from my walk with Mme. de Saint-Loup, before dressing

      for the evening. For many years have now elapsed since the Combray days,

      when, coming in from the longest and latest walks, I would still be in

      time to see the reflection of the sunset glowing in the panes of my

      bedroom window. It is a very different kind of existence at Tansonville

      now with Mme. de Saint-Loup, and a different kind of pleasure that I now

      derive from taking walks only in the evenings, from visiting by moonlight

      the roads on which I used to play, as a child, in the sunshine; while the

      bedroom, in which I shall presently fall asleep instead of dressing for

      dinner, from afar off I can see it, as we return from our walk, with its

      lamp shining through the window, a solitary beacon in the night.

      These shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted for more than a

      few seconds; it often happened that, in my spell of uncertainty as to

      where I was, I did not distinguish the successive theories of which that

      uncertainty was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running, we

      isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a

      bioscope. But I had seen first one and then another of the rooms in which

      I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit them all in the

      long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on going to bed I

      would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the most diverse

      materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a piece of a

      shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper, all of which

      things I would contrive, with the infinite patience of birds building

      their nests, to cement into one whole; rooms where, in a keen frost, I

      would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world (like

      the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark tunnel and is kept warm

      by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire keeping in all night, I

      would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great cloak of snug and savoury

      air, shot with the glow of the logs which would break out again in flame:

      in a sort of alcove without walls, a cave of warmth dug out of the heart

      of the room itself, a zone of heat whose boundaries were constantly

      shifting and altering in temperature as gusts of air ran across them to

      strike freshly upon my face, from the corners of the room, or from parts

      near the window or far from the fireplace which had therefore remained

      cold—or rooms in summer, where I would delight to feel myself a part

      of the warm evening, where the moonlight striking upon the half-opened

      shutters would throw down to the foot of my bed its enchanted ladder;

      where I would fall asleep, as it might be in the open air, like a titmouse

      which the breeze keeps poised in the focus of a sunbeam—or sometimes

      the Louis XVI room, so cheerful that I could never feel really unhappy,

      even on my first night in it: that room where the slender columns which

      lightly supported its ceiling would part, ever so gracefully, to indicate

      where the bed was and to keep it separate; sometimes again that little

      room with the high ceiling, hollowed in the form of a pyramid out of two

      separate storeys, and partly walled with mahogany, in which from the first

      moment my mind was drugged by the unfamiliar scent of flowering grasses,

      convinced of the hostility of the violet curtains and of the insolent

      indifference of a clock that chattered on at the top of its voice as

      though I were not there; while a strange and pitiless mirror with square

      feet, which stood across one corner of the room, cleared for itself a site

      I had not looked to find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal

      field of vision: that room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on

      end to leave its moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the

      exact shape of the room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous

      funnel, had passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out

      in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils sniffing

      uneasily, and my heart beating; until custom had changed the colour of the

      curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression of pity to the

      cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled

      the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly reduced the apparent

      loftiness of the ceiling. Custom! that skilful but unhurrying manager who

      begins by torturing the mind for weeks on end with her provisional

      arrangements; whom the mind, for all that, is fortunate in discovering,

      for without the help of custom it would never contrive, by its own

      efforts, to make any room seem habitable.