🖋️ “For a long time, I went to bed early.

Translated from French.

🖋️ “For a long time, I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, no sooner had I blown out my candle than my eyes would close so quickly that I didn’t have time to think to myself: ‘I’m falling asleep.’ And, half an hour later, the thought that it was time to try to sleep would wake me; I wanted to put down the book I thought I still held in my hands and blow out my candle; whilst asleep, I had not ceased to reflect on what I had just read, but these reflections had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was what the book was talking about: a church, a string quartet, the rivalry between Francis I and Charles V.”

Proust begins the novel with a scene of falling asleep 🛌, or waking up, or hovering between sleep and wakefulness. There will be others, such as the first morning in Balbec, the mornings at the Hôtel de Guermantes 🪟 or, later, the return to the area around Combray, to Gilberte’s house, in Swann’s former home near Méséglise 🌳🌳.

More generally, for the narrator of the Search, physical sensations are inseparable from those of the mind – and remember: it is a sensation of imbalance on two poorly cut cobblestones 👞 that triggers the inner upheaval necessary for the final climax.

But aren’t these opening sentences rather strange? Do they not immediately raise the question of illusion, of the narrative our consciousness weaves for itself, and of the lack of continuity in our sense of self?

What does this final thought mean: “It seemed to me that I was (…) a church” 💒. Fair enough. “(…) a quartet”. Why not. “(…) the rivalry between Francis I and Charles V.” … What, how?! “It seemed to me that I was (…) the rivalry”. Neither Charles V nor Francis I, but the rivalry. The link, the in-between. 🪢

The logic behind this metaphor is most curious, and yet it draws on the language of dreams 🧠. Indeed, it already reveals the narrator’s very distinctive personality.

And what about you – what’s your favourite line from “the Search”? 🗳️

#ÀlaRechercheduTempsperdu #MarcelProust #proustagram #Balbec #RTP #pléiade #Gallimard #NRF #Proust #LeTempsretrouvé #DucôtédechezSwann

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@proustagram18 May 2025 · 2

And what about those three consecutive time connectors at the start of sentences: “For a long time”, “Sometimes” and “half an hour later” – shall we talk about them or not?! 😅

@proustbrasil18 May 2025 · 1

"The memory of a certain image is nothing more than the longing for a certain moment; and houses, roads and avenues are, alas, as fleeting as the years." ❤️

@tatiana_de_courbevoie18 May 2025 · 1

Let’s leave the pretty women to men with no imagination!

@art_atelier.paris.le.faulq18 May 2025 · 3

❤️..." Pleasures are like photographs. What we capture in the presence of our beloved is merely a negative; we develop it later, once we’re back home, when we’ve regained access to that inner chamber whose entrance remains sealed off as long as we’re in the company of others” ... (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, I believe...) Revealing, isn’t it ;) ?

@gregor49919 May 2025 · 1

As well as the opening of “Swann’s Way”, one of my favourite passages is the beginning of “The Guermantes Way”, when the narrator describes the Duchess of Guermantes getting ready and dressing. In which Oriane is likened to a swan unaware that it is a god.

@dub_ze_cactus_19 May 2025 · 1

Because 🔥

@patrickm186820 May 2025 · 2

“But when nothing remains of a distant past, after the death of beings, after the destruction of things, only these—more fragile yet more enduring, more intangible, more persistent, more faithful— the scent and the taste remain for a long time yet, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amidst the ruins of all the rest, bearing without faltering, upon their almost imperceptible droplet, the immense edifice of memory”

@dub_ze_cactus_20 May 2025 · 1

🔥

@paul_ammann_16 July 2025

She came to life; the sky turned a flesh-red, which I tried to see more clearly by pressing my eyes against the windowpane, for I sensed in it a connection to the very reason for nature’s existence, but as the railway tracks changed direction, the train turned away; the morning scene framed by the window was replaced by a village at night with roofs turned blue by the moonlight, with a washhouse smudged by the opalescent mother-of-pearl of the night, beneath a sky still strewn with stars, and I was saddened to have lost my strip of pink sky, when I noticed it anew—though now red—in the window opposite, which it left again at the next bend in the iron track; so that I spent my time running from one window to the other, trying to bring together the irregular fragments of my beautiful, fickle scarlet sky as they appeared in opposite directions, transferring them onto a new canvas and thus obtaining an overall view and a continuous painting of it.
Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time. Volume 2: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: Reclam Library (pp. 312–313). Reclam Verlag.

🖋️ “For a long time, I went to bed early.

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