ening hour, isolated from all
its possible surroundings, detached and solitary against its shadowy
background, the bare minimum of scenery necessary (like the setting
one sees printed at the head of an old play, for its performance in
the provinces) to the drama of my undressing, as though all Combray had
consisted of but two floors joined by a slender staircase, and as though
there had been no time there but seven o'clock at night. I must own
that I could have assured any questioner that Combray did include other
scenes and did exist at other hours than these. But since the facts
which I should then have recalled would have been prompted only by an
exercise of the will, by my intellectual memory, and since the pictures
which that kind of memory shews us of the past preserve nothing of
the past itself, I should never have had any wish to ponder over this
residue of Combray. To me it was in reality all dead.

Permanently dead? Very possibly.

There is a large element of hazard in these matters, and a second
hazard, that of our own death, often prevents us from awaiting for any
length of time the favours of the first.

I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the
souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior
being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so
effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we
happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which
forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our
name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken.
We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our
life.

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to
recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile.
The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of
intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material
object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object,
it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves
must die.

Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was
comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had
any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my
mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did
not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for