Commonplacing Proust. 1

“Peut-être l’immobilité des choses autour de nous leur est-elle imposée par notre certitude que ce sont elles et non pas d’autres, par l’immobilité de notre pensée en face d’elle.” 

-Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann

One is so certain that what one sees and where one sees it is what and where that thing is. What Proust calls the immobility of our thought arranges the objects in one’s view in their place and settles their identity. One wakes and expects to find the same walls, the same furniture in the same place in which they were the night before. A slight disorder or difference throws the mind into confusion. One fears having seen them incorrectly the night before and shudders at the possibility of the mistake, because then that can only mean the senses on which one depends so much have failed. 

Alternatively, somebody or some force might have entered the space and moved them. One feels violated. Or ridiculous for entertaining such a paranoia. 

In sleep, the external world disappears. It is the mind that holds it static. Maybe the confusion one experiences upon waking is caused by one’s projection of order and sequence onto the external world that has no order. How much of this wall is the wall from seven hours ago, how much of this chair a chair. The moment now has already passed as soon as one recognizes it as now and is not the now that one has experienced. The mind hems in the world and predicts it. Solid and immovable when it is not. 

When one looks around and recognizes for a moment that what seems certain is actually uncertain, one also recognizes that there is inherently a movement in everything that exists. Like the branches of a tree that stir in a breeze and the trembling of the leaves that follow discreetly after. There, one feels the freedom of a world in motion, its fluidity.