Finding Time Again: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 7 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Marcel Proust

Just as a bucket being hauled up on a pulley swings around and knocks into the rope here and there on different sides, there was no character with a place in my life, and hardly even any things, that had not in their turn played different roles. A simple social relationship, even a material object, if I rediscovered it in my memory after a few years, I saw that life had gone on weaving different threads around it which eventually became dense enough to form that inimitable, lovely, velvety bloom on the years, like the accretion which in old parks shrouds a simple water pipe in a sheath of emerald. It was not only the appearance of these characters that made one think of them as people in a dream. They themselves were finding that life, already drowsy in youth and in love, had become more and more of a dream. They had even forgotten their resentments and their hatreds, and in order to be certain that it was the person now in front of them with whom they had not been on speaking terms ten years ago, they would have had to consult a register, which, however, would have been just as vague as a dream in which one had been insulted, without it being clear by whom. All these dreams helped to shape the contradictory appearances of political life, with men who had accused each other of murder or treason being members of the same government. And the dream became as murky as death in some old men on the days after those on which they had made love. On those days, there was no point i...