Swann's Way
1871
The famous opening of Swann's Way finds a grown man unable to sleep, his mind tumbling through memories of childhood until a crumb of madeleine cake dipped in tea suddenly unlocks an entire lost world. This is involuntary memory, and it will redefine everything we thought we knew about how the past lives in us. The narrative circles between the narrator's present restlessness and vivid recollections of his childhood in Combray, his desperate longing for his mother's goodnight kiss, and the central 'Swann in Love' narrative: a precise, devastating study of obsession and jealousy as Charles Swann pursues the enigmatic Odette through the parlors of Parisian high society. Proust builds an argument that what we call reality is constructed as much by memory as by present experience, and that the moments we think are gone remain within us, waiting to be triggered by a taste, a scent, a fragment of music.
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“Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.””
— Marcel Proust
“The thirst for something other than what we have…to bring something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when our sensibility, which happiness has silenced like an idle harp, wants to resonate under some hand, even a rough one, and even if it might be broken by it.””
— Marcel Proust
“Now are the woods all black,But still the sky is blue.””
— Marcel Proust
“The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.””
— Marcel Proust
“In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.””
— Marcel Proust
“One cannot change, that is to say become a different person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one has ceased to be.””
— Marcel Proust
“Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.””
— Marcel Proust
“Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand.””
— Marcel Proust
“And then, gradually, the memory of her would fade away, I had forgotten the girl of my dream.””
— Marcel Proust
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Proust, Marcel. Swann's Way. Lex, lex-books.com/book/swann-s-way-2faabf60-d8df-4f3a-8a87-ea198e28a0ea.Proust, M. (1871). Swann's Way. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/swann-s-way-2faabf60-d8df-4f3a-8a87-ea198e28a0eaProust, Marcel. Swann's Way. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/swann-s-way-2faabf60-d8df-4f3a-8a87-ea198e28a0ea.
