Extraordinary thing

And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory--this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?


I do regret the archaic translation here. For the first two books I have this 1982 edition; from that point onward, I've been reading the updated '92 version that joins Enright to Moncrieff and Kilmartin and cleans up some of the needlessly stuffy language, the "whences" and "morrows" and such. This in any case is the moment we've all been waiting for, when the madeleine is dunked in the tea and the narrator's world is rocked. More of this internal craziness in the next entry.