Four-dimensional Proust

...all this made of the church for me something entirely different from the rest of the town: an edifice occupying, so to speak, a four-dimensional space--the name of the fourth being Time--extending through the centuries its ancient nave, which, bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch from which it emerged triumphant...


This is from a (very) long sentence, over 40 lines of text, the full length of an entire (long) paragraph. I resisted the urge to type the whole thing. His long sentences are legendary and, truth be told, a bit ridiculous. He worked and worked over the text, from what I've read, but I've also read that he actually wasn't as disciplined in terms of sentence structure as you might expect someone to be who a) revised and revised and revised; and b) wrote a lot of long sentences.

I like this fragment because of his writing about time as the fourth dimension in a way that sounded like he was just trying the idea out, as if it might in fact be new to readers. Apparently the idea had been floating around since the late 19th century, but it was, still, a novel concept when he was writing Swann's Way in the early 1910s.