Swann's Way

a few seconds; it often happened that, in my spell of uncertainty as to
where I was, I did not distinguish the successive theories of which that
uncertainty was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running,
we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon
a bioscope. But I had seen first one and then another of the rooms in
which I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit them
all in the long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on
going to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the
most diverse materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets,
a piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper,
all of which things I would contrive, with the infinite patience of
birds building their nests, to cement into one whole; rooms where, in
a keen frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the
outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark
tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire
keeping in all night, I would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great
cloak of snug and savoury air, shot with the glow of the logs which