Music Welcome to Snewscast, the podcast designed to help you fall asleep. Find us at snoozecast.com. And if you simply can't get enough of our snooze stories, go to snoozecast.com slash plus. That's PLUS. To learn about what our snoozecast plus and snoozecast plus deluxe listeners get access to. This episode is brought to you by the intoxication of a storm. Tonight, we'll read The Magic Lan lantern. The next excerpt in our series from French writer Marcel Proust's monumental In Search of Lost Time, which is seven volumes long and first published in 1913. In search of lost time follows the narrators, recollections and experiences in the late 19th century and early 20th century high society France while reflecting on the loss of time and lack of meaning in the world. This series does not necessarily need to be followed in sequential order as it is more about the ambiance than a plot. In the first episode, Overture, the narrator recalls his childhood, bed times, bedrooms of his memories, and the peculiar states of consciousness related to sleep. This episode features memories about the magic Lanturn, the narrator's family gives him as a child to help him with his insomnia. Magic Lanturns were an early form of a slide projector. Get cozy. Close your eyes. Relax your body into the softness of your bed. Now, take a few deep breaths. At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I should have to go up to bed and to lie there, unsleeping, far from my mother and grandmother. My bedroom became the fixed point on which my thoughts were centered. Someone had had the happy idea of giving me to distract me on evening's a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner time to come. the manner of the master builders and glass painters of Gothic days, it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls and impalpable iridescence. Supernatural phenomena of many colors in which legends were depicted as on a shifting and transitory window. This change of lighting destroyed as nothing else could have done, the customary impression I had formed of my room. For now I no longer recognized it, as though I were in a room in some hotel or furnished lodging in a place where I had just arrived by train for the first time. Riding at a jerky trot, Golo, his mind filled with an infamous design, issued from the little three-cornered forest which died dark green, the slope of a convenient hill, and advanced by leaps and bounds towards the castle of Por Genoviv de Bourbon. This castle was cut off short by a curved line which was in fact the circumference of one of the transparent ovals in the slides which were pushed into position through a slot in the lantern. It was only the wing of a castle, and in front of it stretched a moor on which Genevieve stood, lost in contemplation, wearing a blue girdle. The castle and the moor were yellow, but I could tell their color without waiting to see them. Or before the slides made their appearance, the old gold sonorous name of Brabal had given me an unmistakable clue. Gollow stopped for a moment and listened sadly to the little speech read aloud by my great aunt, which he seemed perfectly to understand, for he modified his attitude with a docileity not devoid of a degree of majesty, so as to conform to the indications given in the text. And he rode away at the same jerky trot and nothing could arrest his slow progress. If the lantern were moved, I could still distinguish Golo's horse advancing across the window-curdens,

Swelling out with their curves, and diving into their folds. The body of Golo himself, being of the same supernatural substance as his steeds, overcame all material obstacles, everything that seemed to bar his way, by taking each as it might be a skeleton and embodying it in himself. the door handle, for instance, over which adapting itself at once would float infincibly his red cloak or his pale face, never losing its nobility or its melancholy, never showing any sign of trouble at such a trans-substantiation. And indeed, I found plenty of charm in these bright projections, which seemed to have come straight out of the past, and to shed around me the reflections of such ancient history. But I cannot express the discomfort I felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality

until I thought no more of the room than of myself. The anesthetic of fact of custom being destroyed, I would begin to think and to feel very I'm going to make a video about the

story of the movie.

I'm going to make a video about the

story of the movie.

I'm going to make a video about the

story of the movie.

I'm going to make a video about the

story of the movie.

I'm going to make a video about the story

about the story of the movie.

I'm going to make a video about the story of the

story of the movie.

I'm going to make a to feel very melancholy things. The door handle of my room, which was different to me from all the other door handles in the world, and as much as it seemed to open of its own accord and without my having to turn it. So unconscious had its manipulation become, low and behold, it was now an astral body for Golo. And as soon as the dinner bell rang, I would run down to the dining-room, where the big, hanging lamp, ignorant of golo and blue beard, but well acquainted with my family and the dish of stewed beef, shed the same light as on every other evening, and I would fall into the arms of my mother, whom the misfortunes of Genevieve Deppurbont had made all the dearer to me, just as the crimes of Golo had driven me to a more than ordinarily scrupulous examination of my own conscience. But after dinner, alas, I was soon obliged to leave Mama, who stayed talking with the others in the garden if it was fine, or in the little parlor where everyone took shelter when it was wet. Everyone except my grandmother, who held that it is a pity to shut oneself indoors in the country and used to carry on endless discussions with my father on the very wetest days, because he would send me up to my room with a book, instead of letting me stay out of doors. That is not the way to make him strong and active. She would say, sadly, especially this little man who needs all the strength and character that he can get. My father would shrug his shoulders and study the barometer for he took an interest in meteorology while my mother, keeping very quiet so as not to disturb him, looked at him with tender respect, but not too hard, not wishing to penetrate the mysteries of his mind. But my grandmother, in all weathers, even when the rain was coming down in torrents, and Francois had rushed indoors with the precious wicker armchairs so that she should not get them soaked. You would see my grandmother pacing the deserted garden, lashed by the storm, pushing back her gray hair in disorder so that her brows might be more free to imbib the life-giving drafts of wind and rain. She would say, at last one can breathe, and would run up and down the soaking paths, too straight and symmetrical for her liking, owing to the want of any feeling for nature in the new gardener, whom my father had been asking all morning if the weather were going to improve,

with her keen, jerky little step regulated by the various effects brought upon her soul by the intoxication of the storm, the force of hygiene, the stupidity of my education, and of symmetry and gardens, rather than by any anxiety, for that was quite unknown to her, to save her plum-colored skirt from the spots of mud under which it would gradually disappear to a depth which always provided her maid with a fresh problem. When these walks of my grandmother's took place after dinner, there was one thing which never failed to bring her back to the house. That was if, at one of those points, when the revolutions of her course brought her, moth-like, in sight of the lamp in the parlor, where the liquors were set out on the card table. my grade on called out to her, but tealed, come in and stop your husband from drinking brandy. For simply to tease her, she had brought so far in a type of mind into my father's family that everyone made a joke of it. My great-on used to make my grandfather, who was forbidden like hers, take just a few drops. My poor grandmother would come in and beg and implore her husband not to taste the brandy, and he would become annoyed and swallow his few drops all the same. And she would go out again, discouraged, but still smiling. For she was so humble and so sweet that her gentleness towards others appeared on her face blended in a smile which, unlike those seen on the majority of human faces, had no trace in it of irony, say for herself. While for all of us kisses seem to spring from her eyes, which could not look upon those she loved without yearning to bestow upon them passionate caresses. The torments inflicted on her by my great aunt, the sight of my grandmother's vein and treatise. I ran up to the top of the house by myself in a little room beside the school room and beneath the roof, which smelled of oris root, and was sent it also by a wild current which had climbed up between the stones of the outer wall, and thrust a flowering branch in through the half-open window. Intended for more special and abacer use, this room from which, in the daytime, I could see as far as the keep, was for a long time my place of refuge. Doubtless because it was the only room whose door I was allowed to lock. Whenever my occupation was such as required an inviolable solitude, reading or dreaming, secret tears or peroxisms of desire. Alas, I little knew that my own lack of willpower, my delicate health, and the consequent uncertainty as to my future weighed far more heavily on my grandmother's mind than any little breach of the rules by her husband during those endless perambulations. Afternoon and evening, in which we used to see passing up and down, obliquely raised towards the heavens, her handsome face with its brown and wrinkled cheeks, which with age had acquired almost the purple hue of tiled fields in autumn, covered if she were walking a broad, by a half-lifted veil, while upon them either the cold or some sad reflection invariably left the drying traces of an involuntary tear. My soul consolation when I went upstairs for the night was that Mama would come in and kiss me after I was in bed. But this good night lasted for so short a time. She went down again so soon that the moment in which I heard her climb the stairs and then caught the sound of her garden dress of blue muslin from which hung little tassels of plated straw rustling along the double-doored corridor was for me a moment of the keenest sorrow. So much did I love that good night that I reached the stage of hoping that it would come as late as possible, so as to prolong the time of respite during which mama would not yet have appeared. Sometimes when, after kissing me, she opened the door to go, I longed to call her back to say to her, kiss me just once again.

But I knew that then she would at once look displeased for the concession which she made to my wretchedness and coming up to me with this kiss of peace, always annoyed my father, who thought such ceremonies absurd, and she would have liked to try to induce me to outgrow the need, the custom of having her there at all, which was a very different thing from letting the custom grow up of my asking her for an additional kiss when she was already crossing the threshold. And to see her look displeased, destroyed all the sense of tranquility she had brought me a moment before, when she bent her loving face down over my bed, and held it out to me like a host for an act of communion in which my lips might drink deeply the sense of her real presence, and with it the power to sleep. But those evenings on which Mama stayed so short a time in my room were sweet indeed compared to those on which we had guests to dinner.

And then... time in my room were sweet indeed compared to those on which we had guests to dinner, and therefore she did not come at all. Our guests were practically limited to Mesie Swan, who, apart from a few passing strangers, was almost the only person who ever came to the house at Compré. Sometimes to a neighborly dinner, but less frequently since his unfortunate marriage, my family did not care to receive his wife. And sometimes, after dinner, uninvited. On those evenings when, as we sat in front of the house beneath the big chestnut tree, and round the iron table, we heard from the far end of the garden, not the large and noisy rattle, which heralded and deaf end as he approached with its interminable frozen sound. Any member of the household who had put it out of action by coming in without ringing, with the double peel, timid, oval, gilded, of the visitor's bell, everyone would at one sixth claim a visitor who in the world can it be. But they knew quite well that it could only be Misee of Swan. My great aunt, speaking in a loud voice to set an example in a tone which she endeavored to make sound natural would tell the others not to whisper so that nothing could be more unpleasant for a stranger coming in, who would be led to think that people were saying things about him which he was not meant to hear. And then my grandmother would be sent out as a scout, always happy to find an excuse for an additional turn in the garden, which she would utilize to remove seraptitiously as she passed the stakes of a rose tree or two. So as to make the roses look a little more natural. As a mother might run her hand through her boy's hair, after the barber had smoothed it down to make it stick out properly round his head. And there we will stay, hanging on the words which would fall from my grandmother's lips when she brought us back her report of the enemy. though there had been some uncertainty among a vast number of possible invaders. And then soon after, my grandfather would say, I can hear Swan's voice. And indeed, one could tell him only by his voice, for it was difficult to make out his face with its arched nose and green eyes. Under a high forehead, fringed with fair, almost red hair, dressed in the bristle style. Because in the garden, we used as little light as possible so as not to attract mosquitoes. And I would slip away as though not going for anything in particular to tell them to bring out the the serups for my grandmother made a great point, thinking it nicer of their not being allowed to seem anything out of the ordinary, which we kept for visitors only. Although a far younger man, Miss Yara Swann was very much attached to my grandfather, who had been an intimate friend in his time of Swann's, an excellent but an eccentric man in whom the least little thing would, it seemed, often check the flow of his spirits and divert the current of his thoughts. For many years I'll be at, and especially before his marriage, Miss Yerswan, the younger, came off in to see them at Compray.

My great aunt and grandparents never suspected that he had entirely ceased to live in the kind of society which his This family had frequented, or that, under the sort of incognito which the name of Swan gave him among us. They were harboring with the complete innocence of a family of honest in Somekeepers who have in their midst some distinguished highway men and never know it. One of the smartest members of the Jockey Club, a particular friend of the Comte de Pelé and of the Prince of Wales and one of the men most sought after in their aristocratic worlds. Our utter ignorance of the brilliant part which Swan was playing in the world of fashion was, of course, due in part to his own reserve and discretion, but also to the fact that middle-class people in those days took what was almost a Hindu view of the world and of society, which they held to consist of sharply defined casts, so that everyone at his birth found himself called to that station in life, which his parents already occupied and nothing except the chance of a brilliant career or of a good marriage could extract you from that station or admit you to a superior cast. Miss Yoswan, the father, had been a stockbroker, and so young swan found himself in mirrored for life in a cast where once forchown has in a list of taxpayers varied between such and such limits of income. Yn yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n y