For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say “I’m going to sleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to low out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francois I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I was awake; it did not disturb my mind, but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a matter dark indeed. I would ask myself what o’clock it could be; I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, shewed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller would be hurrying towards the nearest station: the path that he followed being fixed for ever in his memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange place, to doing unusual things, to the last words of conversation, to farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp which echoed still in his ears amid the silence of the night; and to the delightful prospect of being once again at home.
Du côté de chez Swann
- The Proustian bedroom, or the secret museum of (his) renunciations.
- The bed is transformed into the center of gravity of a universe made up of fragments, a sort of Renaissance-style studiolo where physical space contracts until it escapes through the circle of light cast by a lamp. The opening lines of the novel announce the catalog raisonné of an auction of shadows, where each sensation has the specific weight of an object in a cabinet of curiosities.
- A wax sentinel, the candle presides over the ritual. When it goes out, the narrator is plunged into a darkness that has the density of the atmosphere of a fin-de-siècle room. In it, vision surrenders to tactility: the book that the sleeper “still believed he held in his hands” has the same relationship to reality as a book of hours had to its medieval owner. In his biography, Ghislain de Diesbach (Proust, Perrin, Paris, 1991) thinks of it as “the liturgy of a voluntary recluse.”
- The book: a phantom object, a relic of consciousness that survives in the limbo of light sleep. For the antiquarian’s sensibility, this non-existent volume is the most valuable in the collection, a piece bound in the skin of reminiscence.
- In this cabinet of wonders—the dream—a phenomenon of decorative “metempsychosis” occurs. The subject dissolves into the object. The narrator ceases to be a body and becomes the very subject of his reading: “a church, a quartet, the historical rivalry between Francis I and Charles V.” Pietro Citati (La colomba pugnalata: Proust e la Recherche, Mondadori, Milan, 1995) describes this trance as the flight of a spirit who, tired of his own form, seeks refuge in the soul of things.
- Architecture of thought, that church organizes—here we hear the echoes of Ruskin—the emptiness of the bedroom, the dreamlike disorder. These entities, which in the daytime world inhabit Gothic naves or period engravings, are transferred into the mind like Meissen porcelain figurines or Gobelins tapestries. Universal history folds back to fit into the dimensions of a room. Jean-Yves Tadié (Marcel Proust, Gallimard, Paris, 1996) sees in this fluctuation the birth of the narrator, who founds the definitive laboratory of his chronology in the immobility of the bed. In that room, lived time is transmuted into the time of style.
- A metamorphosis in which the individual is defined by his surroundings and the objects that inhabit them, even when these are pure projections of the intellect. The church has the solidity of a silver model; the quartet has the vibration of a stringed instrument stored in its case; the rivalry between monarchs is perceived as the clash of two luxurious suits of armor in a hall of lost steps. Everything in Proust’s dream has the attributes of a still life, where time has been suspended. In a lesson in technique, memory constructs a rational space where each memory occupies its place from a rigorous perspective.
- When awakening comes, the veil of “scales over the eyes” acts like the fogged glass of a misted display case. The darkness—“soft and soothing”—reveals itself as a shroud enveloping Thought, so that space can then expand outward. Thus, far from being mere mechanical noise, the whistle of trains becomes a measuring instrument, a surveyor’s ruler defining the extent of the countryside.
- The traveler hurrying to the station becomes a figure taken from a genre painting or a romantic etching. His journey is marked by the “stranger’s lamp,” that object that illuminates the farewell. The lamp, the candlestick, and the sunlight to come form a trinity of lights that decorate this mental scene. Each of them gives a different nuance to the objects; thus, the lamp of another brings the nostalgia of the unpossessed, while one’s own candlestick offers the security of the everyday, of the house that is also one’s own museum.
- Proust’s bedroom ends up being an architectural structure made of habits and spiritual furniture. “Metempsychosis” allows the soul to move from one piece of furniture to another, from one century to another, without leaving the sheets. The first paragraph of À la recherche du temps perdu is the lintel of a door that opens onto an endless gallery. In it, memories are arranged with the meticulousness of a curator who knows that beauty resides in the patina that time deposits on things. One loves a face because it possesses the aura of the ancient; a form that has survived the shipwreck of forgetfulness. According to George Painter (Marcel Proust: A Biography, Chatto & Windus, London, 1959 & 1965), this room constitutes the first excavation of a buried city, the site where personal furnishings acquire the dignity of archaeology.
- To look at the Combray bedroom in the same way one looks at a reliquary; to listen to the narrator in the same way one listens to the hidden mechanism—the prose—of the clock of reminiscence. Prose here is the mestiere, the technique that prevents memory from witnessing its own dissolution. Man does not inhabit space alone, but the aura of the objects that surround him. The beginning of À la recherche defines our identity as the sum of all the shadows we cast on the walls of our own retreat.
