Translations:CP 03024/11/en

Little by little I began to submit to the forces of forgetting, that powerful instrument of adaptation to reality, that destroyer in us of this surviving past which is in constant contradiction with it. Not that I no longer loved Albertine. But already I was no longer in love with her as I was during the final days, but as in the earliest days of our love. Before forgetting her altogether, before attaining my initial indifference, like a traveller who returns by the same route to the point where he started, I would have to traverse in the opposite direction all the feelings through which I had passed. But these stages do not appear to us as immovable. While one is stopped at one of them, one has the illusion that the train is setting off again, but in the direction of the place from which one has come, as one did the first time. Such is the cruelty of memory.