Page 11 - "Puis elle commencait a me devenir inintelligible, comme apres la métempsycose les pensées d'une existence antérieure." - Proust implies that there is something more to our dreams than mere figments of imagination. He likens them to leftover thoughts and memories from past lives.
Page 14 - "Il se croira couché quelques mois plus tot dans une autre contrée." - In Proust's book, time is the enemy. He attempts to defeat time by preserving his memories - in sleep, our perception of time is different, particularly if we fall asleep in the wrong place. The first few pages have this sense of dreaming - the prose is dreamlike, elongated sentences - trying to make it stretch on forever.
1st 4 pages - the dreamworld, the sense of disorientation on waking and realising your dreams are not real - the idea of being returned to one's most primitive state - like primal ancient man.
Page 15 - "avant meme que ma pensée, qui hésitait . . . mon corps se rappelait" - the sense memory, the body memory returns before that of the mind. The sense memory is the most important.
- "mon corps, le coté . . . gardiens fideles d'un passé que mon esprit n'aurait jamais du oublier"- his body's memory is stronger then his mind's
Page 16 - "ces évocations ne duraient jamais que quelque secondes" - he writes at length about very short periods of time - the length of the text does not reflect the quick passage of time - attempting to slow it down
- "ne distinguait pas mieux les unes des autres les diverse suppositions dont elle etait faite, que nou n'isolons en voyant un cheval courir, les positions successives que nous montre le kinétoscope." - these moments happen so close together that you can't tell them apart any more than you can see the individual frames of clip of a horse running. You just get the overall sense of movement. Beautiful analogy. Also shows level of detail he's breaking it down into. H/e - this sense memory that he can't really distinguish then sets of periods of deliberate reflection
Page 17 - a gift for capturing sensations, feelings exactly as they - "le plaisir qu'on goute est de sentir separé du dehors" - exactly the feeling of being curled up in bed on a winter's night
14 - 18 - uncertainty in waking - the sense of constant movement around you as your mind leaps from one scenario to the next
pg 18 - would spend most of the night remembering his childhood, the places he lived in, the people he knew there
p24 - present experiences coloured by the knowledge that they are transient and ephemeral
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