Combray

Swann in Love

Place-Names

Dreams of Place-Names

In the Champs-Elysses

The Bois Garden of Woman

• Rooms at Combray (545)
• Room in the Grand Hotel at Balbec (545)
• The real Balbec and the Balbec of dreams (545)
• The 1.22 train (548)
• Dreams of spring in Florence (549)
• Words and names (550)
• Names of Norman towns (551)
• Abortive plan to visit Florence and Venice (554)
• The doctor forbids me to travel or to go to the theatre to see Berma (559)
• he advises walks in the Champs-Elysees under Francoise’s surveillance (560)

Summary

We are back to the memories of the author as a young boy.

Quotations

“... nature, by virtue of all the feelings that it aroused in me, seemed to me the thing most diametrically opposed to the mechanical inventions of mankind. The less it bore their imprint, the more room it offered for the expansiion of my heart.” [546]

“I need only, to make them reappeara, pronounce the names Balbec, Venice, Florence, within shose syllables had gradually accumulated the longing inspired in me by the places for which they stood. [550]

“How much more inidvidual still was the character they assumed from being designated by names, names that were for themselves alone, proper names such as people have! Words present to us a little picture of things, clear and familiar, like the pictures hung on the walls of schoolrooms to give children an illustration of what is meant by a carpenter’s bench, a bird, an anthhill, things chosen as typicl of evrything else of the same sort. But names present to us - of persons, and of towns whcih they accustom us to regard as individual, as unique, like persons - a confused picture...” [551]

“... even from the point of view of mere quantity, in our lives the days are not all equal. To get through each day, natures that are at all highly strung, ... are equipped, like motor-cars, with different gears. There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.” [555-556]

“... that imaginary Time in which we place not one journey at a time but others simultaneously, without too much agitation since they are only possibilities - that Time which reconstructs itself so effectively that one can spend it again in one town after one has already spent it in another - and assigned to them some of those actual, calendar days which are the certificates of authenticity of the objects on which they are spent, for these unique days are consumed by being used, they do not return, one cannot live them again here when one has lived them there.” [558]

Comment

Much better. We are back to many more reflective comments on time and on psychology.