Peut-être l’immobilité des choses autour de nous leur est-elle imposée par notre certitude que ce sont elles et non pas d’autres, par l’immobilité de notre pensée en face d’elles.

- Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, p.6

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.

- Proust, Swann's Way, p.5

To grasp the exact meaning of the above quote from the beginning of Proust's Search has always been a problem for me. Maybe this is a syntactical issue, but something in the phrasing seems to evade my attention. One meaning of the sentence is, I guess, that we tend perceive elements (choses) outside of our mind as stable or immobile when in fact it is our own mind that is immobile. This might suggest that our mind (or pensées) is not in itself mobile. And this is where I tend to get lost in the logic of the sentence. What the apparently immobile mind imposes on the things that surround us is not so much an actual immobility, but rather a conviction that what is arround us is immobile, thereby saying that what surrounds us is in fact mobile. The power of the mind to render things as immobile is thus merely a selfdelusion. At least according to Proust. Everything is subject to change, especially the mind.