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by Corry Shores
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Walls Full of Dreams
Marcel Proust
Du coté chez swann. A la recherche du temps perdu. Tome I
Swan's Way. Vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past
Première partie
Overature
Combray
I.
§10 /
§11
The narrator takes evening naps. He is disoriented whenever he awakes. His memory runs through all the rooms he ever slept-in, before realizing where he awakes. Previously he explained how he often continues lying and remembering those other rooms, even after knowing he does not sleep in them.
Right now he recalls evenings in his bedroom when a child in Combray. Someone had given him a magic lantern to cheer him up.
Using light from his lamp, it projects colorful images on his wall.
in the manner of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory window.
à l’instar des premiers architectes et maîtres verriers de l’âge gothique, elle substituait à l’opacité des murs d’impalpables irisations, de surnaturelles apparitions multicolores, où des légendes étaient dépeintes comme dans un vitrail vacillant et momentané.
[Below are some drawings of the way the projector works.
And here are some magic lantern images.
To view some parts of a show, see this site by the Laterna Magica Galantee Show. Or watch this video, from youtube clips by null66913 and ilovetoeatmicedotcom.]
As the narrator explained before, our memory develops the habit of recognizing our rooms when we awake in them. This makes them less strange and hence more livable for us. The problem with the magical lantern projections is that it makes his room less recognizable. This causes him to feel uneasy about sleeping there, “as though I were in a room in some hotel or furnished lodging, in a place where I had just arrived, by train, for the first time.”
From the English translation.
At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I should have to go up to bed, and to lie there, unsleeping, far from my mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which my melancholy and anxious thoughts were centred. Some one had had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come: in the manner of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory window. But my sorrows were only increased, because this change of lighting destroyed, as nothing else could have done, the customary impression I had formed of my room, thanks to which the room itself, but for the torture of having to go to bed in it, had become quite endurable. For now I no longer recognised it, and I became uneasy, as though I were in a room in some hotel or furnished lodging, in a place where I had just arrived, by train, for the first time.
From the French:
A Combray, tous les jours dès la fin de l’après-midi, longtemps avant le moment où il faudrait me mettre au lit et rester, sans dormir, loin de ma mère et de ma grand’mère, ma chambre à coucher redevenait le point fixe et douloureux de mes préoccupations. On avait bien inventé, pour me distraire les soirs où on me trouvait l’air trop malheureux, de me donner une lanterne magique, dont, en attendant l’heure du dîner, on coiffait ma lampe; et, à l’instar des premiers architectes et maîtres verriers de l’âge gothique, elle substituait à l’opacité des murs d’impalpables irisations, de surnaturelles apparitions multicolores, où des légendes étaient dépeintes comme dans un vitrail vacillant et momentané. Mais ma tristesse n’en était qu’accrue, parce que rien que le changement d’éclairage détruisait l’habitude que j’avais de ma chambre et grâce à quoi, sauf le supplice du coucher, elle m’était devenue supportable. Maintenant je ne la reconnaissais plus et j’y étais inquiet, comme dans une chambre d’hôtel ou de «chalet», où je fusse arrivé pour la première fois en descendant de chemin de fer.
Proust, Marcel. Du coté chez swann. A la recherche du temps perdu. Tome I.
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