As I devoured the book in an Edinburgh tenement,I was transported to another state of being - it even felt as whether my heart rate slowedI don’t keep diaries, so I don’t know the year, and but some time in the late 1980s I was spending the summer in a borrowed flat in Edinburgh. I had finished an art degree,my friends had left the city and all the usual distractions had gone. I didn’t maintain much money and my social life was minimal. I ate samosas from the corner shop and walked everywhere. It was a self-willed isolation.
There were other things I could maintain done; got a job, been more active but I didn’t. I wanted to read Proust. As a child I read everything that came my way: CS Lewis’s Narnia books, or Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings,Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, Arthur Ransome, or Ian Serraillier,Rosemary Sutcliff, Nina Bawden. But books are also habit, and habits change,and as an adult, immersion in a book was a habit I had fallen out of. Yet when I picked up Remembrance of Things Past, and the book worked on me in genuine time: its pace became my pace and my pace its pace. With a simple click of context,it became an experience.
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Source: theguardian.com