A man who sleeps keeps circled all around him the thread of hours, the line of years and of worlds. He consults them out of instinct upon rising and in them in an instant finds what point on earth he occupies, the time that has unspooled itself till waking, but their order can twist up, break off. Such that toward morning after some insomnia, sleep may overtake him while he reads, in a too-different posture than he usually assumes for sleep, his raised arm suffices to stop and roll back the sun, and at the first moment he wakes, he’ll know the time no longer, he’ll think he’s only barely gone to bed. Or he may doze in a position more displaced and divergent, such as after dinner sitting upright in a chair, then the upheaval will be made complete in worlds beyond our orbit, the magic chair will have him traveling top-speed through time and space, and the moment his eyelids lift, he’ll believe himself in bed many months ago in another country. But it would suffice that, in my own bed, my sleep was deep and my mind entirely relaxed; this would erase the plan of the place where I was sleeping, and when I’d wake in the middle of the night, just as I was ignorant of my location, at first I wouldn’t even know just who I was; I had only, in its primordial simplicity, the sensation of existence as could shudder in the core of an animal; I was more deprived than the caveman in his cave; but then memory – not yet of the place where I was, but of somewhere among the places I’d once lived or where I could have been – would come toward me like a hand from the heavens to hoist me from the Nothing I could not have left on my own; I would soar in a second over centuries of civilization, and that image, confusingly interspersed with gas lamps, then shirts with turned-down collars, reassembled bit by bit the original traits of my self.
☙
Un homme qui dort, tient en cercle autour de lui le fil des heures, l’ordre des années et des mondes. Il les consulte d’instinct en s’éveillant et y lit en une seconde le point de la terre qu’il occupe, le temps qui s’est écoulé jusqu’à son réveil; mais leurs rangs peuvent se mêler, se rompre. Que vers le matin après quelque insomnie, le sommeil le prenne en train de lire, dans une posture trop différente de celle où il dort habituellement, il suffit de son bras soulevé pour arrêter et faire reculer le soleil, et à la première minute de son réveil, il ne saura plus l’heure, il estimera qu’il vient à peine de se coucher. Que s’il s’assoupit dans une position encore plus déplacée et divergente, par exemple après dîner assis dans un fauteuil, alors le bouleversement sera complet dans les mondes désorbités, le fauteuil magique le fera voyager à toute vitesse dans le temps et dans l’espace, et au moment d’ouvrir les paupières, il se croira couché quelques mois plus tôt dans une autre contrée. Mais il suffisait que, dans mon lit même, mon sommeil fût profond et détendît entièrement mon esprit; alors celui-ci lâchait le plan du lieu où je m’étais endormi, et quand je m’éveillais au milieu de la nuit, comme j’ignorais où je me trouvais, je ne savais même pas au premier instant qui j’étais; j’avais seulement dans sa simplicité première, le sentiment de l’existence comme il peut frémir au fond d’un animal: j’étais plus dénué que l’homme des cavernes; mais alors le souvenir—non encore du lieu où j’étais, mais de quelques-uns de ceux que j’avais habités et où j’aurais pu être—venait à moi comme un secours d’en haut pour me tirer du néant d’où je n’aurais pu sortir tout seul; je passais en une seconde par-dessus des siècles de civilisation, et l’image confusément entrevue de lampes à pétrole, puis de chemises à col rabattu, recomposaient peu à peu les traits originaux de mon moi.
☙
N o t e s
Thread. The key word in my view of this paragraph comes in the first sentence, the word I’ve translated as “thread.” The French is fil, related to “filament,” meaning thread, yarn, or wire – something drawn out. Scott Moncrief translated this as “chain.” Davis chose “sequence.” These are understandable choices because as the sentence continues the metaphors shift, to words like “order” and “ranks.” I experienced fil as the dominant image and let it be my guide, making later choices that either don’t combat it (“line,” “twist,” “break”) or actively continue it (“unspool,” “roll back”). I decided that a chain or sequence implies discrete events ruled by cause and effect, quite a different conception of time than a continuous thread. Proust seems to write about time as something fluid or malleable, and his own temporal shifts treat time this way. When I come to understand his conceptions of time more fully, I may make changes here.