I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.Īnd so it is with our own past. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. ![]() I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. There is a large element of hazard in these matters, and a second hazard, that of our own death, often prevents us from awaiting for any length of time the favours of the first. But since the facts which I should then have recalled would have been prompted only by an exercise of the will, by my intellectual memory, and since the pictures which that kind of memory shews us of the past preserve nothing of the past itself, I should never have had any wish to ponder over this residue of Combray. ![]() I must own that I could have assured any questioner that Combray did include other scenes and did exist at other hours than these. Swann, the unconscious author of my sufferings, the hall through which I would journey to the first step of that staircase, so hard to climb, which constituted, all by itself, the tapering ‘elevation’ of an irregular pyramid and, at the summit, my bedroom, with the little passage through whose glazed door Mamma would enter in a word, seen always at the same evening hour, isolated from all its possible surroundings, detached and solitary against its shadowy background, the bare minimum of scenery necessary (like the setting one sees printed at the head of an old play, for its performance in the provinces) to the drama of my undressing, as though all Combray had consisted of but two floors joined by a slender staircase, and as though there had been no time there but seven o’clock at night. From Overture:Īnd so it was that, for a long time afterwards, when I lay awake at night and revived old memories of Combray, I saw no more of it than this sort of luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background, like the panels which a Bengal fire or some electric sign will illuminate and dissect from the front of a building the other parts of which remain plunged in darkness: broad enough at its base, the little parlour, the dining-room, the alluring shadows of the path along which would come M. As this is the scene that begins the Recherche, it is especially worth returning to given its the centenary of the publication of Swann’s Way: not only does “the whole of Combray … sprng into being … from my cup of tea,” but this is the entry point of the entire novel sequence - a stunning meditation on the difference between voluntary and involuntary memory time and the palpable sense of it being both finite and infinite and a consideration of the creative wellspring from which all art springs. ![]() Those who have read Proust, and even those who haven’t, all know about the episode with the madeleine and tisane.
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