In Time
Within a Budding Grove is the second part of the In Search of Lost Time series by Marcel Proust.
Early in the book, Proust has paragraph where he grapples with the realization that he exists in time, and like everybody else is subject to it’s constraints. This realization is triggered by something his father had just said. I’ve shared the second half of the passage.
The second suspicion, which was really no more than a variant of the first, was that I was not situated somewhere outside Time, but was subject to its laws, just like those characters in novels, who, for that reason, used to plunge me into such gloom when I read of their lives, down at Combray, in the fastness of my hooded wicker chair. In theory, one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can rest assured. So it is with Time in one’s life. And to make its flight perceptible novelists are obliged, by wildly accelerating the beat of the pendulum, to transport the reader in a couple of minutes over ten, twenty, or even thirty years. At the top of one page we have left a lover full of hope; at the foot of the next we have met him again, a bowed old man of eighty, painfully dragging himself on his daily walk around the courtyard of a hospital, scarcely replying to what is said to him, oblivious of the past. In saying of me, “He’s no longer a child,” “His tastes won’t change now,” and so forth, my father had suddenly made me conscious of myself in Time. and caused me the same kind of depression as if I had been, not yet the enfeebled old pensioner, but one of those heroes of who the author, in a tone of indifference which is particularly galling, says to us at the end of a book: “He very seldom comes up from the country now. He has finally decided to end his days there.”
Madame Swann at Home, pages 74-75.
If you liked this, you might want to revisit the Proustian Sentences post from last year.