I felt a sense of tiredness and fear at the thought that all this length of time had not only uninterruptedly been lived, thought, secreted by me, that it was my life, that it was myself, but also that I had to keep it attached to me at every moment, that it supported me, that I was perched on its vertiginous summit, and that I was unable to move without its collaboration, without taking it with me. The date at which I heard the sound of the garden bell at Combray, so distant and yet still within me, was a benchmark in that vast dimension which I did not know I had. I felt giddy at the sight
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