‘And yet to myself the sound of my own voice was pleasant, as were the
most imperceptible, the most internal movements of my body. And so I
endeavoured to prolong it. I allowed each of my inflexions to hang
lazily upon its word, I felt each glance from my eyes arrive just at
the spot to which it was directed and stay there beyond the normal
period. “Now, now, sit still and rest,” said my grandmother. “If you
can’t manage to sleep, read something.” And she handed me a volume of
Madame de Sévigné which I opened, while she buried herself in the
Mémoires de Madame de Beausergent. She never travelled anywhere
without a volume of each. They were her two favourite authors. With no
conscious movement of my head, feeling a keen pleasure in maintaining
a posture after I had adopted it, I lay back holding in my hands the
volume of Madame de Sévigné which I had allowed to close, without
lowering my eyes to it, or indeed letting them see anything but the
blue window-blind. But the contemplation of this blind appeared to me
an admirable thing, and I should not have troubled to answer anyone
who might have sought to distract me from contemplating it. The blue
colour of this blind seemed to me, not perhaps by its beauty but by
its intense vivacity, to efface so completely all the colours that had
passed before my eyes from the day of my birth up to the moment in
which I had gulped down the last of my drink and it had begun to take
effect, that when compared with this blue they were as drab, as void
as must be retrospectively the darkness in which he has lived to a man
born blind whom a subsequent operation has at length enabled to see
and to distinguish colours. An old ticket-collector came to ask for
our tickets. The silvery gleam that shone from the metal buttons of
his jacket charmed me in spite of my absorption. I wanted to ask him
to sit down beside us. But he passed on to the next carriage, and I
thought with longing of the life led by railwaymen for whom, since
they spent all their time on the line, hardly a day could pass without
their seeing this old collector. The pleasure that I found in staring
at the blind, and in feeling that my mouth was half-open, began at
length to diminish. I became more mobile; I even moved in my seat; I
opened the book that my grandmother had given me and turned its pages
casually, reading whatever caught my eye.’
Someone describing the sensation of being stoned? Nope. It’s Proust, from Volume II. Absolutely amazing.
On Thursday I finished Volume II and started Volume III.
