Time Regained (In Search of Lost Time #7)

by Marcel Proust

The train, I remember, had come to a halt in open countryside. The sun’s rays illuminated the upper half of the trunks of a line of trees that followed the railway. ‘Trees, I thought, you have nothing to say to me any longer, my heart has grown cold and no longer responds to you. Here I am, after all, in the middle of nature, my eyes noting the line which separates your glowing foliage from your shaded trunks, and I feel only coolness and boredom. If ever I could have thought of myself as a poet, I now know that I am not. Perhaps in this new era of my life which, however desiccated, is now opening, human beings may be able to inspire in me what nature no longer says to me. But the days when I might perhaps have been capable of singing its song will never come back.’