Una muy buena historia de Marcel Proust la que desarrolla aquí, Swann´s Way. Para leer en
inglés y practicar la pronunciación…
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.
At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the
time when I should have to go up to bed, and to lie there, unsleeping, far from
my mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which my
melancholy and anxious thoughts were centred. Someone had had the happy idea of
giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally pitiful, a magic
lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time
to come: in the manner of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days
it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence,
supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a
shifting and transitory window. But my sorrows were only increased, because
this change of lighting destroyed, as nothing else could have done, the
customary impression I had formed of my room, thanks to which the room itself,
but for the torture of having to go to bed in it, had become quite endurable.
For now I no longer recognised it, and I became uneasy, as though I were in a
room in some hotel or furnished lodging, in a place where I had just arrived,
by train, for the first time.
Riding at a jerky walk, Golo, his mind filled with an
infamous design, issued from the little three-cornered forest which dyed
dark-green the slope of a convenient hill, and advanced by leaps and bounds
towards the castle of poor Geneviève de Brabant. This castle was cut off short
by a curved line which was in fact the circumference of one of the transparent
ovals in the slides which were pushed into position through a slot in the
lantern. It was only the wing of a castle, and in front of it stretched a moor
on which Geneviève stood, lost in contemplation, wearing a blue strap. The
castle and the moor were yellow, but I could tell their colour without waiting
to see them, for before the slides made their appearance the old-gold sonorous
name of Brabant had given me an unmistakable clue. Golo stopped for a moment
and listened sadly to the little speech read aloud by my great-aunt, which he
seemed perfectly to understand, for he modified his attitude with a docility
not devoid of a degree of majesty, so as to conform to the indications given in
the text; then he rode away at the same jerky trot. And nothing could arrest
his slow progress. If the lantern were moved I could still distinguish Golo's
horse advancing across the window-curtains, swelling out with their curves and
diving into their folds. The body of Golo himself, being of the same
supernatural substance as his steed's, overcame all material
obstacles—everything that seemed to bar his way—by taking each as it might be a
skeleton and embodying it in himself: the door-handle, for instance, over
which, adapting itself at once, would float invincibly his red cloak or his
pale face, never losing its nobility or its melancholy, never showing any sign
of trouble at such a transubstantiation.
And, indeed, I found plenty of charm in these bright
projections, which seemed to have come straight out of a Merovingian past, and
to shed around me the reflections of such ancient history. But I cannot express
the discomfort I felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room
which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until I thought no
more of the room than of myself. The anaesthetic effect of custom being
destroyed, I would begin to think and to feel very melancholy things. The
door-handle of my room, which was different to me from all the other
doorhandles in the world, considering that it seemed to open of its own accord
and without my having to turn it, so unconscious had its manipulation become;
look, it was now an astral body for Golo. And as soon as the dinner-bell rang I
would run down to the dining-room, where the big hanging lamp, ignorant of Golo
and Bluebeard but well acquainted with my family and the dish of stewed beef, shed
the same light as on every other evening; and I would fall into the arms of my
mother, whom the misfortunes of Geneviève de Brabant had made all the dearer to
me, just as the crimes of Golo had driven me to a more than ordinarily
scrupulous examination of my own conscience… (from Swann´s
Way, by Marcel Proust)
Para
saber
Geneviève
de Brabant: es una heroína medieval. Geneviève, esposa de Siegfried of Treves, es acusada falsamente y
se esconde en unas cuevas con su hijo para salvar su vida.
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