Time Regained by Marcel Proust & D. J. Enright & Joanna Kilmartin & Andreas Mayor & Terence Kilmartin

Author:Marcel Proust & D. J. Enright & Joanna Kilmartin & Andreas Mayor & Terence Kilmartin [Unknown]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Unknown, Classics, Fiction, General, France - Social Life and Customs - Fiction, Autobiographical Fiction, Literary, France
ISBN: 9780375753121
Google: 26HxAAAAMAAJ
Amazon: 0375753125
Publisher: Modern Library
Published: 1993-05-17T22:00:00+00:00

within me can only be nourished on the

essence of things and finds in them alone

its subsistence and its delight. It

languishes in the observation by the senses

of the present sterilised by the intelligence

awaiting a future constructed by the will

out of fragments of the past and the present

from which it removes still more reality,

keeping that only which serves the narrow

human aim of utilitarian purposes. But let

a sound, a scent already heard and

breathed in the past be heard and breathed

anew, simultaneously in the present and in

the past, real without being actual, ideal

without being abstract, then instantly the

permanent and characteristic essence

hidden in things is freed and our true being

which has for long seemed dead but was

not so in other ways awakes and revives,

thanks to this celestial nourishment. An

instant liberated from the order of time has

recreated in us man liberated from the

same order, so that he should be conscious

of it. And indeed we understand his faith

in his happiness even if the mere taste of a

madeleine does not logically seem to

justify it; we understand that the name of

death is meaningless to him for, placed

beyond Time, how can he fear the future?

But that illusion which brought near me a

moment of the past incongruous to the

present, would not last. Certainly we can

prolong the visions of memory by willing

it which is no more than turning over an

illustrated book. Thus formerly, when I

was going for the first time to the

Princesse de Guermantes’ from the sun-lit

court of our house in Paris, I had lazily

focused my mind at one moment on the

square where the church of Combray

stood, at another on the sea shore of

Balbec, as I might have amused myself by

turning over a folio of water-colours of

different places I had visited and

cataloguing these mnemonic illustrations

with the egotistical pleasure of a

collector, I might have said: “After all, I

have seen some beautiful things in my

life.” Doubtless, in that event, my memory

would have been asserting different

sensations but it would only have been

combining their homogeneous elements.

That was a different thing from the three

memories I had just experienced which, so

far from giving me a more flattering notion

of my personality, had, on the contrary,

almost made me doubt its very existence.

Thus, on the day when I dipped the

madeleine in the hot infusion, in the heart

of that place where I happened to be

(whether that place was, as then, my room

in Paris or, as to-day, the Prince de

Guermantes’ library) there had been the

irradiation of a small zone within and

around myself, a sensation (taste of the

dipped madeleine, metallic sound, feeling

of the uneven steps) common to the place

where I then was and also to the other

place (my Aunt Léonie’s room, the

railway carriage, the Baptistry of St.

Mark’s). And, at the very moment when I

was thus reasoning, the strident sound of a

water-pipe, exactly like those long

screeches which one heard on board

excursion steamers at Balbec, made me

experience (as had happened to me once

in a large restaurant in Paris at the sight of

a luxurious dining-room half empty,

summerlike and hot) something more than

a mere sensation like one I had, one late

afternoon at Balbec, when, all the tables

symmetrically laid

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