There is little doubt that I am beginning to unwind from the spring semester. The idea of relaxing and settling in with a good novel is very appealing. Proust's first volume of "In Search of Lost Time" (also called Remembrance of Times Past) is such a novel.

The novel begins with a section called Combray which describes the narrator's memories as a young boy when they visit his aunt's home in Combray. The first chapter revolves around two boyhood memories: a good night kiss from his mother and having tea & a madeleine (cookie) on Sunday mornings before mass.

The story begins with a description of many of the sensations that the narrator has as he awakens from a deep sleep. Such a simple event goes on for pages and immediately gives the reader a sense that this is no ordinary novel.

"But for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my cosciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke in the middle of the night, not knowing where I was, I could not even be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal's consciousness; I was more destitute than the cave-dweller; but then the memory - not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived and might now very possibly be - would come like a rope 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." (p. 4-5)

One sentence: 12 commas, 2 semi-colons, 1 colon and 2 dashes. I doubt if the phrase "I awoke" will ever have the same meaning for me again.

I am now on page 78. I do not plan on providing detailed notes of the novel, but will spend my time reading. Then again, as I struggle with this last statement, I realize that I do want to write more. As with many novels that I thoroughly enjoy, there is often a strong author presence, which I will attempt to capture with some isolated quotes, usually having to do with psychology/philosophy.

• Perhaps the immobilty of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them. (p. 5)
• These shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted for more than a few seconds... (p. 7)
• Habit! that skilful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last ... The anaesthetic effect of habit being destroyed, I would begin to think - and to feel ... (p. 8 - 11)
• ... in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice: I preferred not to see them (p. 14)
• ... our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people (p. 23)
• Even the simple act which we describe as "seeing someone we know" is to some extent an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the person we see with all the notions we have already formed about him, and in the total picture of him which we compose in our minds those notions have certainly the principal place. (p. 23)