Albumleaf 195: August 10, 2022 (Bologna)

This notion of Time embodied, of years past but not separated from us, it was now my intention to emphasize as strongly as possible in my work. And at this very moment . . . as though to strengthen me in my resolve, the noise of my parents’ footsteps as they accompanied M. Swann to the door and the peal–resilient, ferruginous, interminable, fresh and shrill–of the bell on the garden gate which informed me that at last he had gone and that Mamma would presently come upstairs, these sounds rang again in my ears, yes, unmistakably I heard these very sounds, situated as they were in a remote past. . . .

And I felt, as I say, a sensation of weariness and almost of terror at the thought that all this length of Time had not only, without interruption, been lived, experienced, secreted by me, that it was my life, was in fact me, but also that I was compelled so long as I was alive to keep it attached to me, that it supported me and that, perched on its giddy summit, I could not myself make a movement without displacing it. A feeling a vertigo seized me as I looked down beneath me, yet within me, as though from a height, which was my own height, of many leagues, at the long series of the years.

Marcel Proust
Time Regained, pp. 449-451
Translation: Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin