… So, we would just leave Paris by this train of one hour twenty-two that I had taken too long to look for in the indicator of the railways, where it gave me each time the emotion, almost the blessed illusion of departure, so as not to imagine that I knew him …
(…)
At a time when I was counting the thoughts that had filled my mind during the previous minutes, to realize whether or not I had just slept (and when the very uncertainty that made me ask myself the question was providing me with a affirmative answer), in the window pane, above a small black wood, I saw indented clouds whose soft down was of a fixed, dead pink, which will never change, like the one who dyes the feathers of the wing which assimilated it or the pastel on which the painter’s fantasy deposited it.
But I felt that on the contrary this color was neither inertia, nor whim, but necessity and life. Soon, heaps of light piled up behind her. It came alive, the sky became an incarnate that I tried, by gluing my eyes to the glass, to see better, because I felt it in connection with the deep existence of nature, but the line of the railway having changed direction, the train turned, the morning scene was replaced in the window frame by a nocturnal village with blue moonlight roofs, with a washhouse clogged with the opaline mother-of-pearl of the night, under a sky still strewn with all its stars, and I was sorry to have lost my strip of pink sky when I saw it again, but red this time, in the window opposite which it abandoned at a second bend of the railway; so much so that I spent my time running from one window to another to get closer, to re-lather the intermittent and opposite fragments of my beautiful scarlet and versatile morning and to have a total view and a continuous picture.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (Marcel Proust)
Mona Collins
