In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [50]
“What are you doing now?” I asked him.
“I must leave you, I’m afraid. We’re going on a route march in three quarters of an hour, and I have to be on parade.”
“Then it’s been a great bother to you, coming here?”
“No, no bother at all, the Captain was very good about it. He told me that if it was for you I must go at once. But I don’t like to seem to be abusing the privilege.”
“But if I got up and dressed quickly and went by myself to the place where you’ll be training, it would interest me immensely, and I could perhaps talk to you during the breaks.”
“I shouldn’t advise you to do that. You’ve been lying awake, fretting about something that I assure you is not of the slightest importance, but now that it has ceased to worry you, you should turn over and go to sleep—you’ll find it an excellent antidote to the demineralisation of your nerve-cells. Only you mustn’t go to sleep too soon, because our band-boys will be coming along under your windows. But as soon as they’ve passed I think you’ll be left in peace, and we shall meet again this evening at dinner.”
But soon I was constantly going to see the regiment doing field manoeuvres, when I began to take an interest in the military theories which Saint-Loup’s friends used to expound over the dinner-table, and when it had become the chief desire of my life to see at close quarters their various leaders, just as a person who makes music his principal study and spends his life in the concert halls finds pleasure in frequenting the cafés in which one can share the life of the members of the orchestra. To reach the training ground I used to have to make long journeys on foot. In the evening after dinner the longing for sleep made my head droop every now and then as in a fit of vertigo. Next morning I realised that I had not heard the band any more than, at Balbec, after the evenings on which Saint-Loup had taken me to dinner at Rivebelle, I used to hear the concert on the beach. And when I wanted to get up I had a delicious sensation of being incapable of doing so; I felt myself fastened to a deep, invisible soil by the articulations (of which my tiredness made me conscious) of muscular and nutritious roots. I felt myself full of strength; life seemed to extend more amply before me; for I had reverted to the healthy tiredness of my childhood at Combray on mornings after the days when we had taken the Guermantes walk. Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years. And great fatigue followed by a good night’s rest can to a certain extent help us to do so. For in order to make us descend into the most subterranean galleries of sleep, where no reflexion from overnight, no gleam of memory comes to light up the interior monologue—if the latter does not itself cease—fatigue followed by rest will so thoroughly turn over the soil and penetrate the bedrock of our bodies that we discover down there, where our muscles plunge and twist in their ramifications and breathe in new life, the garden where we played in our childhood. There is no need to travel in order to see it again; we must dig down inwardly to discover it. What once covered the earth is no longer above but beneath it; a mere excursion does not suffice for a visit to the dead city: excavation is necessary also. But we shall see how certain fugitive and fortuitous impressions carry us back even more effectively to the past, with a more delicate precision, with a more light-winged, more immaterial, more headlong, more unerring, more immortal flight, than these organic dislocations.
Sometimes my exhaustion was greater still. I had followed the manoeuvres for several days on end without being able to go to bed. How