Madame Psychosis

Let's revisit Proust's opening via another translation

For a long time I went to bed early.  Sometimes, my candle scarcely out, my eyes would close so quickly that I did not have time to say to myself: "I'm falling asleep."  And, half an hour later, the thought that it was time to try and sleep would wake me; I wanted to put down the book I thought I still had in my hands and blow out my light; I had not ceased while sleeping to form reflections on what I had just read, but these reflections had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was what the book was about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francois I and Charles V.  This belief lived on for a few seconds after my waking; it did not shock my reason but lay heavy like scales on my eyes and kept them from realizing that the candlestick was no longer lit.  Then it began to grow unintelligible to me, as after metempsychosis do the thoughts of an earlier existence; the subject of the book detached itself from me, I was free to apply myself to it or not; immediately I recovered my sight and I was amazed to find a darkness around me soft and restful for my eyes, but perhaps even more so for my mind, to which it appeared a thing without cause, incomprehensible, a thing truly dark.

Compare this to what Deleuze says about the way each present always replays the whole past, which really includes all of time, suggesting that this life, "my" life has already been lived before in some sense.

Moreover, what we say of a life may be said of several lives. Since each is a passing present, one life may replay another at a different level, as if the philosopher and the pig, the criminal and the saint, played out the same past at different levels of a gigantic cone. This is what we call metempsychosis. Each chooses his pitch or his tone, perhaps even his lyrics, but the tune remains the same, and underneath all the lyrics the same tra-la-la, in all possible tones and all pitches.

I'm hardly saying this idea of the transmigration of souls is easy to understand or makes complete sense to me.  But if we're in the business of investigating how identity is constructed, rather than given, if we're willing to entertain some flexibility in our definition of ourselves, if, at the limit, we're willing to wonder what an eternal life outside of time might mean -- well, then maybe the idea of reincarnation starts to make more sense.  Maybe my eternal life isn't mine after all.