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

by Marcel Proust

So it began to seem that what the being which had now been resuscitated in me three or four times had just enjoyed might well have been fragments of existence which had escaped from time, but that the contemplation of them, while a contemplation of eternity, was itself fugitive. And yet I felt that the pleasure it had brought to my life, albeit at rare intervals, was the only one that was both real and fertile. The sign of the unreality of the others is surely shown clearly enough, either by the impossibility of their satisfying us, as for instance in the case of social pleasures, which at best result in discomfort caused by the ingestion of awful food, or friendship, which is a fiction because the artist who, for whatever reason, gives up an hour of work to spend an hour chatting with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist (friends being friends only within the ambit of that mild eccentricity which accompanies our lives, and which we acquiesce in, but which in our heart of hearts we know is like the wanderings of a madman who believes the furniture is alive and talks to it), or else by the sadness which follows their satisfaction, as with the sadness I felt on the day when I had been introduced to Albertine, for the trouble I had gone to, slight though it was, in order to obtain something—the acquaintance of a young girl—which seemed a slight thing only because I had obtained it. Even a more profound pleasure, like the one I shou...