During the war, the narrator spends many months in a sanatorium 🤒🤕🛌, far from Paris (Proust drew inspiration from…

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  @proustagram27 April 2024 · 5

  🖋️ “It seemed (it had seemed so, particularly at first, for those who, unlike me, had not lived far from Paris had grown accustomed to stripping away from things we had seen many times the deep impression and the thought that give them their true meaning), it almost seemed as though there was something cruel about these leaves granted to the soldiers. At first, we said to ourselves: ‘They won’t want to go back; they’ll desert.’ And indeed, they did not merely come from places that seemed unreal to us because we had only heard of them in the newspapers and could not imagine that anyone could have taken part in those titanic battles and returned with nothing more than a bruise on the shoulder; they had come from the shores of death, to which they were bound to return, and had spent but a moment amongst us, incomprehensible to us, filling us with tenderness, dread, and a sense of mystery, like those dead whom we conjure up, who appear to us for a second, whom we dare not question and who, in any case, could at best reply: “You could not possibly imagine.” For it is extraordinary to what extent, amongst the survivors of the fire that are those on leave, amongst the living or the dead whom a medium hypnotises or summons, the sole effect of contact with the mystery is to increase, if that is possible, the insignificance of what is said. Thus I approached Robert, who still bore a scar on his forehead—a scar that seemed to me more majestic and more mysterious than the footprint left on the earth by a giant. And I had not dared to ask him any questions, and he had spoken to me only in simple terms. Yet they differed very little from what they would have been before the war, as if people, in spite of themselves, continued to be what they were; the tone of the conversations was the same, only the subject matter differed—and even then, only slightly!”
  
  — Marcel Proust, “Time Regained”, 1927
  Pléiade 1954 (ed. Clarac and Ferré), vol. III, p. 757