(no subject)

[proximoception]

I've lost my favorite part of Proust, and am wondering if I dreamed it into existence, like the memory of getting my divorced, now dead grandparents to meet again. He can't sleep, or is drifting into and out of sleep, his bedroom has an odd shape, the shadows do something on the ceiling. There's a comprehending, one of those five-page paragraph buildups that gets something exactly right about life, in that way Proust mastered and few others have ever even tried, the world's drawn in around you tighter sentence by sentence until you feel like a single movement of yours would send domino waves of slight fascinating change out into all of it so pervasively that it would knock back into you from behind within moments. My favorite part and I remember nothing about it.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

The ceiling of his room in Balbec, at the beginning of part 2 of A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs? How hard it is for his mind to fill the unaccustomed space?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

No it was a happier one. The section that seems closest is 79-87 of Guermantes in Moncrieff/Kilmartin, where he's at the hotel by Saint-Loup's barracks.; between "Mais, des le second jour, il me fallut aller coucher a l'hotel" and "Certains jours, j'etais agite par l'envie de revoir ma grand-mere ou par la peur qu'elle ne fut souffrante;..."; but this episode (nonepisode) doesn't seem quite right either, though I love it.

I wonder if my memory just sewed together the sleep bits of the Overture, the one you mention, the Guermantes one, and whichever others (there's a lot about sleeping after Albertine's gone I think), into some vague metonym for the whole novel.