Translated from the French by C. K. Scott Moncrieff.
hould 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 furn
Years ago, at an auction, I bought an old two-volume set of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past in the Scott-Moncrieff translation. It turned out to be the finest book of fiction that I have ever read. It is the only book I know that tells me -in almost scientific detail- what goes through a person's mind, what a sensitive and artistic person actually thinks and feels. The incidents of the book -while fascinating- are not as important as the knowledge Proust gives us of what it is to be a human being.
a very long read but a vary good one it took me several years to read all the set but it is a very good book.
