Swanns Way | Page 3

by degrees the component parts of my ego.

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon
them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else,
and by the immobility of our conceptions of them. For it always
happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an
unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything would be
moving round me through the darkness: things, places, years. My body,
still too heavy with sleep to move, would make an effort to construe the
form which its tiredness took as an orientation of its various members,
so as to induce from that where the wall lay and the furniture stood, to
piece together and to give a name to the house in which it must be
living. Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, knees, and
shoulder-blades offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at
one time or another slept; while the unseen walls kept changing,
adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it
remembered, whirling madly through the darkness. And even before
my brain, lingering in consideration of when things had happened and
of what they had looked like, had collected sufficient impressions to
enable it to identify the room, it, my body, would recall from each
room in succession what the bed was like, where the doors were, how
daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a passage outside,
what I had had in my mind when I went to sleep, and had found there
when I awoke. The stiffened side underneath my body would, for
instance, in trying to fix its position, imagine itself to be lying, face to
the wall, in a big bed with a canopy; and at once I would say to myself,
"Why, I must have gone to sleep after all, and Mamma never came to
say good night!" for I was in the country with my grandfather, who
died years ago; and my body, the side upon which I was lying, loyally
preserving from the past an impression which my mind should never
have forgotten, brought back before my eyes the glimmering flame of
the night-light in its bowl of Bohemian glass, shaped like an urn and
hung by chains from the ceiling, and the chimney-piece of Siena
marble in my bedroom at Combray, in my great-aunt's house, in those
far distant days which, at the moment of waking, seemed present
without being clearly denned, but would become plainer in a little
while when I was properly awake.
Then would come up the memory of a fresh position; the wall slid

away in another direction; I was in my room in Mme. de Saint-Loup's
house in the country; good heavens, it must be ten o'clock, they will
have finished dinner! I must have overslept myself, in the little nap
which I always take when I come in from my walk with Mme. de
Saint-Loup, before dressing for the evening. For many years have now
elapsed since the Combray days, when, coming in from the longest and
latest walks, I would still be in time to see the reflection of the sunset
glowing in the panes of my bedroom window. It is a very different kind
of existence at Tansonville now with Mme. de Saint-Loup, and a
different kind of pleasure that I now derive from taking walks only in
the evenings, from visiting by moonlight the roads on which I used to
play, as a child, in the sunshine; while the bedroom, in which I shall
presently fall asleep instead of dressing for dinner, from afar off I can
see it, as we return from our walk, with its lamp shining through the
window, a solitary beacon in the night.
These shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted for more
than a few seconds; it often happened that, in my spell of uncertainty as
to where I was, I did not distinguish the successive theories of which
that uncertainty was composed any more than, when we watch a horse
running, we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear
upon a bioscope. But I had seen first one and then another of the rooms
in which I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit them
all in the long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on
going to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the
most diverse materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets,
a piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper,
all of which things I would contrive, with the infinite patience