A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the sequence of the hours, the order of the years and worlds. He consults them instinctively as he wakes and reads in a second the point on the earth he occupies, the time that has elapsed before his waking; but their ranks can be mixed up, broken.

Marcel Proust, “Swann’s Way,” In Search of Lost Time, p. 5, trans. by Lydia DAvis