The book and the bed

Proust's novel begins and ends with the word ‘time’: the first word ‘Longtemps’ emphasised by the succeeding comma, the last, ‘Temps’ by its capital letter. In the first paragraphs references to divisions or lapses of time proliferate - ‘de bonne heure’ (early); ‘quelques secondes’ (a few seconds); 'une existence anterieure’ (a previous existence) - and then gradually become less insistent. These words provide a steadying background to a first-person voice evoking the state of semi-wake fulness, on the way into or out of sleep, which is a universal experience; a book, just laid aside, conditions an initial phase of deluded rationality - ‘it seemed to me I was what was being discussed in the book: a church, a quartet…’ - but the chief components of that state are fleeting physical sensations and even more elusive attempts at thought. The movement towards fuller consciousness demands a revaluation of phenomena misinterpreted seconds before, and to effect this the mind must wait on memory, which sleeps more soundly than all its other functions:

In the words of a much later part of the novel, a reminiscence and expansion of these first pages:

In the first and second paragraphs of Swann's Way, through the narrator's inward eye, and not summoned by his memory so much as by his surroundings - a distant trainwhistle, his watch showing midnight - we glimpse a figure or figures whose relation to him is not clear, and whom we must wait a long time, in our reading, to identify as himself, at later stages of the novel, but seen from a great distance, as he will never, in those stages, be seen again.