Then the memory of a new attitude would be reborn; the wall would spin in another direction: I’d be in my room chez Madame de Saint-Loup, in the country; My God! It’s at least ten o’clock, dinner must be over by now! I’ll have overextended the nap I took each evening upon returning from my walk with Madame de Saint-Loup, before donning my night clothes. For many years have passed since Combray, where, when we got home late, it was red reflections of sunset I’d see on the glass of my window.

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Perhaps the immobility of things around us is imposed upon them by our certitude that they’re themselves and not other things, by the immobility of our thinking in the face of them. Yet when I’d wake this way, my restless mind searching and failing to know where I was, all would turn about me in the dark, things, country, years. My body, too numb to move, would try, from the form of its fatigue, to pinpoint the position of its limbs and infer the direction of the wall, the placement of the furnishings, to reconstruct and name the dwelling where it found itself.

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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.

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At times, like Eve sprung loose from Adam’s rib, a woman would be born in my sleep from the false position of my thigh. Formed from the pleasure I was on the verge of savoring, she it was, I imagined, who offered me the flavor. My body, which sensed in hers its own heat, desired to meet – I’d awaken. All other humans seemed so distant compared to this woman I’d left only moments before; my cheek was still warm with her kiss, my body still ached with her weight and length.

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I’d go to sleep, and sometimes I’d have just a moment’s stirring, time enough to hear the woodwork creak, organic, to open my eyes and steady the kaleidoscopic dark, to taste in a flicker of consciousness the sleep that swallowed the furniture, the room itself, the Everything, of which I was a tiny part and whose senseless state I’d soon rejoin. Or while sleeping I had found, without seeking, an age forever lost from my primitive life, rediscovered my infantile terrors, like when my grand uncle would jerk me by my curls, a terror that evaporated one day when – for me the birth of a new era – they were cut off.

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I’d tenderly press my cheeks against the lovely cheeks of the pillow which, full and fresh, are like the cheeks of childhood. I’d strike a match to read my watch. Almost midnight. The moment when the sick man, who’d been forced to set forth on a trip and to sleep in a unknown hotel, awakened by a fit, would rejoice in sighting under the doorway a sliver of sunlight. Thank heavens, it’s already morning!

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For a long time I went to bed early. Sometimes, my candle barely snuffed, my eyes would close so fast I had no time to say, “I’m sleeping.” And after half an hour, the thought that it was time to seek my sleep would wake me; I’d want to put aside the book I thought I still had in my hands and blow my light out; I wouldn’t stop reflecting on whatever I’d just read, but these reflections took a turn to something rather strange; it would seem to me that I myself became the subject of the book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François the first and Charles the fifth.

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