The Guermantes Way (In Search of Lost Time, #3)

by Marcel Proust

Is it because we relive past years not in their continuous sequence, day by day, but by fixing our memory on the coolness or sunshine of one particular morning or evening spent in the shade of some isolated setting, enclosed, static, arrested, lost, remote from everything else, and because the changes gradually effected not only in the world outside but in our dreams and in our developing personality, changes which have carried us along through life from one phase to a wholly different one without our noticing, are therefore nullified, that, if we relive another memory taken from a different year, the gaps, the immense stretches of oblivion between the two, make us feel something like a huge gulf of difference in altitude or the incompatibility of two utterly dissimilar qualities of breathed atmosphere and surrounding coloration?