We organise our lives in terms of past, present and future, and we have three tenses with which to speak of them. Our bodies live according to them: we have come from, we are going to, and we are currently in. We spatialise time because time is so elusive. We have clocks, which segment time, calendars which look “full” or “empty” (spatial terms again), turns of phrase (“my day was filled with…”) and proverbs about time “flying” when we’re having fun. We can play with these tenses, splice and subdivide them, insert them into each other to make subtler points about how they nestle together when we look backwards or forwards: “I will have done”, “I was later to know”, “I would, by then, have discovered”… Like paints or cooking ingredients, it is a matter of mixing and combining, of learning to use what we’ve got in order to communicate the inside of our lives, which are often richer and more complicated than we can express. It is the borders between tenses that interest Proust, because that is where living gets done. Proust is a novelist of borders: between inner and outer, self and other, individual and society, feeling and thought.