The Church and Time

Early in Swann's Way Proust talks about the church in Combray, St. Hilaire, and dwells for the first time on a major theme that he later explores in the final volume: "...all this made of the church for me something entirely different from the rest of the town: an edifice occupying, so to speak, a fourth dimensional space — the name of the fourth being Time..." The history of St. Hilaire enthralls the young hero, and he is left stunned by the glamour and mystery of the past contained within its Gothic walls and stained-glass windows to such an extent that it becomes alive for him, another dimension of reality.