Of course I’d be wide awake now, my body would turn one last time, and the good angel of certitude would halt the things around me, would settle me under my blankets, in my room, and in the darkness put in their approximate places my dresser, my desk, my fireplace, the street-facing window and the two doors. But however well I knew I was not in the homes my waking ignorance had presented in an instant, as distinct images, implying at least their possible presence, my memory would be set in motion; I generally wouldn’t try to sleep again at once; I’d pass most of the night remembering our life of old, at Combray chez my great aunt, at Balbec, in Paris, in Doncières, in Venice, and many more, remembering these places, the people I’d known in them, what I’d seen in them, what others had told me about them.

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These wheeling and confused evocations never lasted longer than some seconds; often, my brief uncertainty of where I was wouldn’t single out one or the other of the diverse suppositions it was made from, just as we cannot isolate, watching a running horse, the successive positions a kinetoscope can show us. But I’d review now one, now another of the rooms I’d inhabited in my life, and I’d end up recalling them all in the drawn-out daydreams that followed my waking; winter rooms, where when in bed, I’d nuzzle my head in a nest that I’d braid from the most disparate things; a corner of pillow, the top of the cover, a piece of shawl, the side of the bed, and a pink-papered issue of Débats, all of which I’d end up cementing together per the technique of birds, adding on infinitely; where in an icy cold the pleasure I’d savor was feeling separate from the outdoors (like the sea swallow who has its nest at the base of a tunnel in the heat of the earth), and where, the fire being stoked all night in the chimney, I’d sleep as if under a great cloak of hot, hazy air, lit by the glimmers of embers reigniting, a kind of impalpable alcove, a warm cave dug in the heart of the room itself, a zone with burning, mobile thermal contours, with puffs of air that refreshed the face coming cooled from the corners, from places near the window or far from the fire;—summer rooms, where I’d love to be one with the temperate night, where moonlight, pressed through half-open shutters, cast at the foot of the bed its luminous ladder, where I’d sleep in almost open air, like the chickadee balanced on a breeze at the tip of a sunray—; sometimes the Louis Sixteenth room, so cheerful that even the first evening there I was not too unhappy, and where columns that lightly supported the ceiling stood with great grace to reveal and reserve the place of the bed; this same room sometimes, on the contrary, too tight, with too-high ceilings hollowed in the shape of a pyramid two stories tall, partially clad in mahogany, where from the first second I was morally poisoned by the unknown odor of vetiver, convinced of the hostility of the purple curtains, and of the insolent indifference of the clock clacking harshly, as if I weren’t there;—where a strange and merciless mirror with quadrangular feet, obliquely blocking one corner of the room, gouged into the gentle plenitude of my usual field of vision an unexpected space; where my thoughts, striving for hours to break loose, to stretch high to take on the precise shape of the room and manage to fill to the brim its gigantic funnel, had endured so many hard nights, while I lay in bed, eyes raised, ear anxious, nostril restive, heart hammering; until habit at last changed the color of the curtains, hushed the clock, taught mercy to the oblique and cruel mirror, covered, if not completely cleared, the odor of vetiver, and noticeably lowered the apparent height of the ceiling.

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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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