The narrator tells his experiences when going to bed
and trying to sleep, the noises, the feelings and the awakenings while trying
to sleep…
Sometimes, too,
just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a woman would come into
existence while I was sleeping, conceived from some strain in the position of
my limbs. Formed by the appetite that I was on the point of gratifying, she it
was, I imagined, who offered me that gratification. My body, conscious that its
own warmth was permeating hers, would strive to become one with her, and I
would awake. The rest of humanity seemed very remote in comparison with this
woman whose company I had left but a moment ago: my cheek was still warm with
her kiss, my body bent beneath the weight of hers. If, as would sometimes
happen, she had the appearance of some woman whom I had known in waking hours,
I would abandon myself altogether to the sole quest of her, like people who set
out on a journey to see with their own eyes some city that they have always
longed to visit, and imagine that they can taste in reality what has charmed
their fancy. And then, gradually, the memory of her would dissolve and vanish,
until I had forgotten the maiden of my dream.
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 sleep; 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 in chaos 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 wait and move 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.Marcel Proust et Lucien Daudet |
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... (adapted in easier English from Swann´s Way, by Marcel Proust)
Vocabulary
Urn: a vase for
holding the ashes of the cremated dead.
From
around the web
Swann´s Way, summary of this volume
The
book: the original
title in French: À la recherche du temps perdu, by Marcel Proust. Published in
English: 1922. Pages: 4215 (a real challenge!)
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