"In Search of Lost Time" Excerpts

Here are all the excerpts I've brought in from In Search of Lost Time.

Note: Roman numerals after each excerpt refer to the individual books within In Search of Lost Time (e.g., Sodom and Gomorrah is the fourth book, so IV).

The first very long excerpt is the famous “madeleine episode” from the end of the first book, Swann’s Way, but reformatted by Charles Mee.

I believe that all of these excerpts are from the older C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation, not the newer Lydia Davis translation.

Excerpts after the jump...



One day in winter, as I came home,
my mother,
seeing that I was cold,
offered me some tea,

a thing I did not ordinarily take.

I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason,
changed my mind.

She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called
'petites madeleines,'
which look as though they had been moulded
in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell.

And soon,

mechanically,

weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow,

I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea
in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake.

No sooner had the warm liquid,
and the crumbs with it,
touched my palate
than a shudder ran through my whole body,

and I stopped,
intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place.

An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses,
but individual,

detached,

with no suggestion of its origin.

And at once
the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me,
its disasters innocuous,
its brevity illusory-
this new sensation having had on me
the effect which love has
of filling me with a precious essence;

or rather this essence was not in me,
it was myself.

I had ceased now to feel mediocre,
accidental, mortal.

Whence could it have come to me,
this all-powerful joy?

I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours,
could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs.

Whence did it come?
What did it signify?
How could I seize upon and define it?

I drink a second mouthful,
in which I find nothing more than in the first,
a third, which gives me rather less than the second.

It is time to stop;

the potion is losing its magic.

It is plain that the object of my quest,
the truth,
lies not in the cup but in myself.

The tea has called up in me, but does not itself understand,
and can only repeat indefinitely with a gradual loss of strength,
the same testimony;
which I, too, cannot interpret,
though I hope at least to be able to call upon the tea for it again
and to find it there presently,
intact and at my disposal,
for my final enlightenment.

I put down my cup and examine my own mind.

It is for it to discover the truth.
But how?

What an abyss of uncertainty
whenever the mind feels that some part of it
has strayed beyond its own borders;
when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region
through which it must go seeking,
where all its equipment will avail it nothing.

Seek?
More than that: create.

It is face to face with something which does not so far exist,
to which it alone can give reality and substance,
which it alone can bring into the light of day.

And I begin again to ask myself what it could have been,
this unremembered state which brought with it
no logical proof of its existence,
but only the sense that it was a happy,
that it was a real state
in whose presence other states of consciousness melted
and vanished.

I decide to attempt to make it reappear.

I retrace my thoughts to the moment
at which I drank the first spoonful of tea.
I find again the same state,
illumined by no fresh light.
I compel my mind to make one further effort,
to follow and recapture once again the fleeting sensation.
And that nothing may interrupt it in its course
I shut out every obstacle, every extraneous idea,
I stop my ears and inhibit all attention
to the sounds which come from the next room.

And then,
feeling that my mind is growing fatigued
without having any success to report,
I compel it for a change to enjoy that distraction
which I have just denied it,
to think of other things,
to rest and refresh itself before the supreme attempt.

And then for the second time
I clear an empty space in front of it.
I place in position before my mind's eye
the still recent taste of that first mouthful,
and I feel something start within me,
something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth;

I do not know yet what it is,
but I can feel it mounting slowly;

I can measure the resistance,
I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.

Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being
must be the image,
the visual memory which,
being linked to that taste,
has tried to follow it into my conscious mind.
But its struggles are too far off,
too much confused;
scarcely can I perceive the colourless reflection
in which are blended the uncapturable whirling medley
of radiant hues,
and I cannot distinguish its form,
cannot invite it,
as the one possible interpreter,
to translate to me the evidence of its contemporary,
its inseparable paramour,

the taste of cake soaked in tea;

cannot ask it to inform me what special circumstance is in question, of what period in my past life.

Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness,
this memory,
this old, dead moment
which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled
so far to importune, to disturb,
to raise up out of the very depths of my being?
I cannot tell.

Now that I feel nothing, it has stopped,
has perhaps gone down again into its darkness,
from which who can say whether it will ever rise?

Ten times over I must essay the task,
must lean down over the abyss.
And each time the natural laziness which deters us
from every difficult enterprise,
every work of importance,
has urged me to leave the thing alone,
to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries of to-day
and of my hopes for to-morrow,
which let themselves be pondered over without effort
or distress of mind.

And suddenly the memory returns.
The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine
which on Sunday mornings at Combray
(because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom,
my aunt Léonie used to give me,
dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea.

The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it;
perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the interval, without tasting them,
on the trays in pastry-cooks' windows,
that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days
to take its place among others more recent;
perhaps because of those memories,
so long abandoned and put out of mind,
nothing now survived, everything was scattered;
the forms of things,
including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry,
so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds,
were either obliterated
or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place
in my consciousness.

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists,
after the people are dead,
after the things are broken and scattered,
still,
alone,
more fragile,
but with more vitality,
more unsubstantial,
more persistent,
more faithful,
the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time,

like souls,

ready to remind us,
waiting and hoping for their moment,
amid the ruins of all the rest;

and bear unfaltering,
in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence,
the vast structure of recollection.
(I)

"When sleep bore him so far away from the world inhabited by memory and thought, through an ether in which he was alone, more than alone, without even the companionship of self-perception, he was outside the range of time and its measurements." (IV)

"Perhaps every night we accept the risk of experiencing, while we are asleep, sufferings which we regard as null and void because they will be felt in the course of a sleep which we suppose to be unconscious... and I entered the realm of sleep, which is like a second dwelling into which we move for that one purpose... The race that inhabits it, like that of our first human ancestors, is androgynous. A man in it appears a moment later in the form of a woman. Things in it show a tendency to turn into men, men into friends and enemies. The time that elapses for the sleeper, during these spells of slumber, is absolutely different from the time in which the life of the waking man is passed... Then, in the chariot of sleep, we descend into depths in which memory can no longer keep up with it, and on the brink of which the mind has been obliged to retrace its steps. / The horses of sleep, like those of the sun, move at so steady a pace, in an atmosphere in which there is no longer any resistance, that it requires some little meteorite extraneous to ourselves (hurled from the azure by what Unknown?) to strike our regular sleep (which otherwise would have no reason to stop, and would continue with a similar motion world without end) and to make it swing sharply round, return towards reality, travel without pause, traverse the regions bordering on life-whose sounds the sleeper will presently hear, still vague but already perceptible even if distorted-and come to earth suddenly at the point of awakening. Then from those profound slumbers we awake in a dawn, not knowing who we are, being nobody, newly born, ready for anything, the brain emptied of that past which was life until then... Then, from the black storm through which we seem to have passed (but we do not even say we), we emerge prostate, without a thought, a we that is void of content. What hammer-blow has the person or thing that is lying there received to make it unconscious of everything, stupefied until the moment when memory, flooding back, restores to it consciousness of personality?" (IV)

"One can of course maintain that there is but one time, for the futile reason that it is by looking at the clock that one established as being merely a quarter of an hour what one had supposed a day. But at the moment of establishing this, one is precisely a man awake, immersed in the time of waking man, having deserted the other time. Perhaps indeed more than another time: another life. We do not include the pleasures we enjoy in sleep in the inventory of the pleasures we have experienced in the course of our existence... It seems a positive waste. We have had pleasure in another life which is not ours. If we enter up in a budget the pains and pleasures of dreams (which generally vanish soon enough after our waking), it is not in the current account of our everyday life." (IV)

"A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to posses other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; as this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star." (V 343)

"Society is like sexual behavior, in that no one knows what perversions it may develop once aesthetic considerations are allowed to dictate its choices." (V)

"The lie, the perfect lie, about people we know, about the relations we have had with them, about our motive for some action, formulated in totally different terms, the lie as to what we are, whom we love, what we feel with regard to people who love us and believe that they have fashioned us in their own image because they keep on kissing us morning, noon and night-that lie is one of the few things in the world that can open windows for us on to what is new and unknown, that can awaken in us sleeping senses for the contemplation of universes that otherwise we should never have known." (V)

"And indeed I was quite well aware now that before I forgot her altogether, before I reached the initial stage of indifference, I should have, like a traveller who returns by the same route to his starting-point, to traverse in the return direction all the sentiments through which I had passed before arriving at my great love. But these fragments, these moments of the past are not immobile, they have retained the terrible force, the happy ignorance of the hope that was then yearning towards a time which has now become the past, but which a hallucination makes us for a moment mistake retrospectively for the future. I read a letter from Albertine, in which she had said that she was coming to see me that evening, and I felt for an instant the joy of expectation. In these return journeys along the same line from a place to which we shall never return, when we recall the names, the appearance of all the places which we have passed on the outward journey, it happens that, while our train is halting at one of the stations, we feel for an instant the illusion that we are setting off again, but in the direction of the place from which we have come, as on the former journey. Soon the illusion vanishes, but for an instant we felt ourselves carried away once again: such is the cruelty of memory." (VI)