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

by Marcel Proust

Materially, nothing was different; but I suddenly felt the elimination of those external obstacles because in fact I was no longer having to make the effort of adaptation or attention which we make, without even being aware of it, when we come across something new: the streets through which I was now passing were those, forgotten for so long, through which I had walked with Françoise on the way to the Champs-Élysées. The ground knew of its own accord where it had to lead; its resistance was overcome. And, like an aviator, who has up to that point traveled laboriously along the ground, suddenly “taking off,” I rose up slowly toward the silent heights of memory. In Paris, these streets will always stand out for me, as if made of a different material from the rest. When I reached the corner of the rue Royale, where once had stood the open-air vendor of the photographs of which Françoise had been so fond, I felt that the cab, carried forward by so many hundreds of previous turnings, would be unable to resist turning of its own accord. I was not passing through the same streets as those who were out walking along them that day, but instead moving through a shifting past, sad and gentle. Yet it was composed of so many different pasts that it was hard to define what was causing my feeling of melancholy, whether it was due to those walks on the way to see Gilberte, simultaneously fearful that she would not come, or to the proximity of a certain house to which I had been told that ...