“For a long time I went to bed early.” Such are the first words of the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, Proust's monumental work, in which one remains trapped due to the fierce discrepancy between its apparent simplicity and its real complexity. The phrase is crammed with time. “During” refers to a period. “A lot” dilates it. “Time” he names it. “Early” refers us to the time. Even “acosté” is conjugated in the past tense. Only “me” seems to be left out, a two-letter pronoun stuck in the middle of that temporal artifact.
Continue reading
