Sentence No. 58 · 24 May 2026
Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say "I'm going to sleep."
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
Marcel Proust — Swann's Way (1913) · Read it at Project Gutenberg
What holds this sentence together
The time clause "when I had put out my candle" is sandwiched between commas, splitting "Sometimes" from "my eyes would close." Whenever you see a "when" clause tucked between two commas mid-sentence, it belongs there, not at the start or the end.
How it appears in Sentle
On Sentle this sentence arrives in 7 pieces, shuffled, with the lines that lead up to it for context. The novel opens with the narrator drifting between sleep and waking. Putting it back in the author’s order is the puzzle — and the order is rarely arbitrary, which is what the note above is about.
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