SWANN'S WAY (Modern Classics Series): In Search of Lost Time (Du Côté De Chez Swann) - Philosophical and Aesthetic Masterpiece that Titillated Even Virginia Woolf's Desire for Expression

by Marcel Proust

myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book:

the whole surroundings of which I formed but an insignificant part and whose unconsciousness I should very soon return to share.

one of my childish terrors, such as that old terror of my great-uncle's pulling my curls,

Formed by the appetite that I was on the point of gratifying, she it was, I imagined, who offered me that gratification.

gradually, the memory of her would dissolve and vanish, until I had forgotten the maiden of my dream.

the magic chair will carry him at full speed through time and space,

when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first who I was;

then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now very possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being,

would put together by degrees the component parts of my ego.

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.

while the unseen walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirling madly through the darkness.

my body, the side upon which I was lying, loyally preserving from the past an impression which my mind should never have forgotten,

visiting by moonlight the roads on which I used to play, as a child, in the sunshine;

I did not distinguish the successive theories of which that uncertainty was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running, we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a bioscope.

my waking dream:

I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth),

a cave of warmth dug out of the heart of the room itself,

rooms in summer, where I would delight to feel myself a part of the warm evening,

the insolent indifference of a clock that chattered on at the top of its voice as though I were not there;

custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling.

Custom! that skilful but unhurrying manager who begins by torturing the mind for weeks on end with her provisional arrangements; whom the mind, for all that, is fortunate in discovering, for without the help of custom it would never contrive, by its own efforts, to make any room seem habitable.

the good angel of certainty had made all the surrounding objects stand still,

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

a magic lantern,

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.

Golo,

I could still distinguish Golo's horse advancing across the window-curtains, swelling out with their curves and diving into their folds.

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,

never shewing any sign of trouble at such a transubstantiation.

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, inasmuch as it seemed to open of its own accord and without my having to turn...

looked at him with tender respect, but not too hard, not wishing to penetrate the mysteries of his superior mind.

the soaking paths—too straight and symmetrical for her liking, owing to the want of any feeling for nature

(she had brought so foreign a type of mind into my father's family that everyone made a joke of it),

she was so humble and so sweet that her gentleness towards others, and her continual subordination of herself and of her own troubles,

in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them;

she went down again so soon that the moment in which I heard her climb the stairs, and then caught the sound of her garden dress of blue muslin, from which hung little tassels of plaited straw, rustling along the double-doored corridor, was for me a moment of the keenest sorrow.

she bent her loving face down over my bed, and held it out to me like a Host, for an act of Communion in which my lips might drink deeply the sense of her real presence, and with it the power to sleep.

M. Swann,

less frequently since his unfortunate marriage, as my family did not care to receive his wife)

the double peal—timid, oval, gilded—of the visitors' bell,

my grandmother would be sent out as a scout,

she would utilise to remove surreptitiously, as she passed, the stakes of a rose-tree or two, so as to make the roses look a little more natural, as a mother might run her hand through her boy's hair,

Although a far younger man, M. Swann was very much attached to my grandfather, who had been an intimate friend, in his time, of Swann's father,

an eccentric man in whom the least little thing would, it seemed, often check the flow of his spirits and divert the current of his thoughts.

probably thinking it too complicated to inquire into how, at such a time, he could have allowed himself to be carried away by an impulse of happiness,

"It's a funny thing, now; I very often think of my poor wife, but I cannot think of her very much at any one time."

"Often, but a little at a time, like poor old Swann," became one of my grandfather's favourite phrases, which he would apply to all kinds of things.

one of the smartest members of the Jockey Club, a particular friend of the Comte de Paris and of the Prince of Wales,