Awakenings 1

“... the path he is taking will be engraved in his memory by the excitement induced by strange surroundings, by unaccustomed activities, by the conversation he has had and the farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp that still echo in his ears amid the silence of the night, and by the happy prospect of being home again.” [2]

“... while sleeping I had drifted back to an earlier stage in my life, now for ever outgrown...” [3]

“... like people who set out on a journey to see with their eyes some city of their desire, and imagine that one can taste in reality what has charmed one’s fancy.” [3]

“When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly bodies. Instinctively he consults them when he awakes, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth’s surface and the time that has elapsed during his slumbers...” [4]

“... if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep...” [4]

“... I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depth’s of an animal’s consciousness...” [4]

“... the memory ... of various other places where I had lived ... would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse centuries of civilization, and out of a blurred glimpse of oil-lamps, then of shirts with turned-down collars, would gradually piece together the original components of my ego.” [4-5]

“My body ... Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, its knees, its shoulder blades, offfered it a series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept ... my body - would recall from each room in succession ... These shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted for more than a few seconds ... But I had seen first one and then another of the rooms in which I had slept during my life. [5-7]

Comments

The author is extremely facile with language. The tendency to free associate one event to another and still maintain a sense of meaning is impressive. He strikes me as a very sensitive man, perhaps even a bit effeminate. The quotations that I noted are all related to psychology, particularly memory. This fits with the title of the series, “In Search of Lost Time”.

[2001.03.02]