This notion of Time embodied, of years past but not separated from us, it was now my intention to emphasize as strongly as possible in my work. And at this very moment . . . as though to strengthen me in my resolve, the noise of my parents’ footsteps as they accompanied M. Swann to the door and the peal–resilient, ferruginous, interminable, fresh and shrill–of the bell on the garden gate which informed me that at last he had gone and that Mamma would presently come upstairs, these sounds rang again in my ears, yes, unmistakably I heard these very sounds, situated as they were in a remote past. . . .
And I felt, as I say, a sensation of weariness and almost of terror at the thought that all this length of Time had not only, without interruption, been lived, experienced, secreted by me, that it was my life, was in fact me, but also that I was compelled so long as I was alive to keep it attached to me, that it supported me and that, perched on its giddy summit, I could not myself make a movement without displacing it. A feeling a vertigo seized me as I looked down beneath me, yet within me, as though from a height, which was my own height, of many leagues, at the long series of the years.
Marcel Proust Time Regained, pp. 449-451 Translation: Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin
For I felt myself to be alone; things had become alien to me; I no longer had calm enough to break out of my throbbing heart and introduce into them a measure of stability. The town before me had ceased to be Venice . . . I could no longer tell it anything about myself. I could leave nothing of myself imprinted upon it; it contracted me into myself until I was no longer more than a beating heart and an attention strained to follow the development of O sole mio. . . . rising like a dirge for the Venice I had known. . . . My mind, no doubt in order not to have to consider the decision I had to make, was entirely occupied in following the course of the successive phrases of O sole mio, singing them to myself with the singer . . . No doubt this trivial song, which I had heard a hundred times did not interest me in the least. . . . None of the already familiar phrases of this sentimental ditty was capable of furnishing me with the resolution I needed; . . . I said to myself: “After all, I’m only listening to one more phrase,” I knew that the words meant: “I shall remain by myself in Venice.” . . .
My mother must by now have reached the station. In a little while she would be gone . . . I looked on at the slow realization of my distress, built up artistically . . . note by note, by the singer as he stood beneath the astonished gaze of the sun . . . Thus I remained motionless, my will dissolved, no decision in sight.
But suddenly, from caverns darker than those from which flashes the comet which we can predict . . . my will to action arose at last; I set off in hot haste . . .
Marcel Proust The Fugitive, pp. 749-752 Translation: C.K. Scott Moncrief and Terence Kilmartin
There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.
I would run my eyes over [Albertine], stretched out below me. From time to time a slight, unaccountable tremor ran through her, as the leaves of a tree are shaken for a few moments by a sudden breath of wind. . . .
It was gratifying to me . . . that when she alighted from the car in the afternoon, it should be to my house that she was returning. It was even more so to me that when, from the underworld of sleep, she climbed the last steps of the staircase of dreams, it was in my room that she was reborn to consciousness and life. . . . Then she would find her tongue and say: “My–” or “My darling–” followed by my first name, which, if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book, would be “My Marcel,” or “My darling Marcel.”
Marcel Proust The Captive, p. 73, 77 Translation: C.K. Scott Moncrief and Terence Kilmartin
M. de Charlus, with a tolerant, genial, insolent smile, replied: “Why, that’s not of the slightest importance, here!” And he gave a little laugh that was all his own–a laugh that came down to him probably from some Bavarian or Lorraine grandmother, who herself had inherited it, in identical form, from an ancestress, so that it had tinkled now, unchanged, for a good many centuries in little old-fashioned European courts, and one could appreciate its precious quality, like that of certain old musical instruments that have become very rare.
Marcel Proust Sodom and Gomorrah, p. 394 Translation: C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin
“After we’ve beaten them” [said Françoise] “we won’t allow one Englishman into France unless he pays three hundred francs admission, as we have to pay now to land in England.”
Such was, in addition to great decency and civility and, when they were talking, an obstinate refusal to allow any interruption, going back time and time again to the point they had reached if one did interrupt them, thus giving their talk the unshakeable solidity of a Bach fugue, the character of the inhabitants of this tiny village which did not boast five hundred, set among its chestnuts, its willows, and in fields of potatoes and beetroot.
