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 far away I can see it, as we return from our walk, with its lamp shining
through the window, a solitary fire in the night.
These shifting
and confused movements 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 comfortable 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 rushes 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 channel,
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 arrogance 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.Marcel Proust, graveyard |
Certainly I was
now well awake; my body had turned about for the last time and the good angel
of certainty had made all the surrounding objects stand still, had set me down
under my bedclothes, in my bedroom, and had fixed, approximately in their right
places in the uncertain light, my chest of drawers, my writing-table, my
fireplace, the window overlooking the street, and both the doors. But it was no
good my knowing that I was not in any of those houses of which, in the stupid
moment of waking, if I had not caught sight exactly, I could still believe in
their possible presence; for memory was now set in motion; as a rule I did not
attempt to go to sleep again at once, but used to spend the greater part of the
night recalling our life in the old days at Combray with my great-aunt, at
Balbec, Paris, Doncières, Venice, and the rest; remembering again all the
places and people that I had known, what I had actually seen of them, and what
others had told me… (from Swann´s Way, by Marcel Proust)
Vocabulary
Biocospe: a kind
of early movie projector
Titmouse: Any of
numerous small insect-eating passerine birds of the family Paridae, found in
woodland areas throughout the world.
From
around the web
This article was
in The New York Times in 2013. It describes the events organized by the city of
New York to celebrate the centennial of Swann´s Way:
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