Proust Moment, April 14, 2003

Day for Night

Marcel's hypnagogic memories and associations continue apace: he is in the past, in the Combray home of Mme Saint-Loup, and he has overslept in the nap he takes before his evening walk. But no, he isn't in Combray, but Tansonville, and Mme. Saint-Loup is older, as is he.

"It is a very different kind of existence at Tansonville now with Mme. de Saint-Loup, and a different kind of pleasure that I now derive from taking walks only in the evenings, from visiting by moonlight the roads on which I used to play, as a child, in the sunshine; while the bedroom, in which I shall presently fall asleep instead of dressing for dinner, from afar off I can see it, as we return from our walk, with its lamp shining through the window, a solitary beacon in the night."

--"Overture," Swann's Way