The sense of place merely precedes the sense of dislocation. The security of Combray produces the romance of Balbec, the boredom of Balbec the excitement of Venice. It is merely one link in a chain of similar circumstances . . . . But there is still another turn of the screw. Emotions may make illusions of perception.
Time can make illusions of the emotions . . . .
Proust attempts to get at reality from three points of view at once, the past, the present, and the future. The structure of his book cannot by intention be chronological. It is, rather, centrifugal. The floating narrator, trying to fall asleep, slowly becoming aware of the various rooms and places in which he has lived, might be compared to a spider at the center of a circular web, spinning a world out of his own consciousness. His books expand successively outward and downward from himself.