Swann's Way
that he might therefore make a noise), upon some old packing-cases from
which nothing would really be sent flying but the dust, though the din
of them, in the resonant atmosphere that accompanies hot weather, seemed
to scatter broadcast a rain of blood-red stars; and from the flies who
performed for my benefit, in their small concert, as it might be the
chamber music of summer; evoking heat and light quite differently from
an air of human music which, if you happen to have heard it during a
fine summer, will always bring that summer back to your mind, the flies'
music is bound to the season by a closer, a more vital tie--born of
sunny days, and not to be reborn but with them, containing something
of their essential nature, it not merely calls up their image in our
memory, but gives us a guarantee that they do really exist, that they
are close around us, immediately accessible.
This dim freshness of my room was to the broad daylight of the street
what the shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to say, equally luminous,
and presented to my imagination the entire panorama of summer, which
my senses, if I had been out walking, could have tasted and enjoyed in
fragments only; and so was quite in harmony with my state of repose,
which (thanks to the adventures related in my books, which had just
excited it) bore, like a hand reposing motionless in a stream of running
water, the shock and animation of a torrent of activity and life.
But my grandmother, even if the weather, after growing too hot, had
broken, and a storm, or just a shower, had burst over us, would come up
and beg me to go outside. And as I did not wish to leave off my book, I
would go on with it in the garden, under the chestnut-tree, in a little
sentry-box of canvas and matting, in the farthest recesses of which I
used to sit and feel that I was hidden from the eyes of anyone who might
be coming to call upon the family.
And then my thoughts, did not they form a similar sort of hiding-hole,
in the depths of which I felt that I could bury myself and remain
invisible even when I was looking at what went on outside? When I saw
any external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain
between me and it, enclosing it in a slender, incorporeal outline which
prevented me from ever coming directly in contact with the material
form; for it would volatilise itself in some way before I could touch
it, just as an incandescent body which is moved towards something wet
never actually touches moisture, since it is always preceded, itself, by
a zone of evaporation. Upon the sort of screen, patterned with different
states and impressions, which my consciousness would quietly unfold
while I was reading, and which ranged from the most deeply hidden
aspirations of my heart to the wholly external view of the horizon
spread out before my eyes at the foot of the garden, what was from the
first the most permanent and the most intimate part of me, the lever
whose incessant movements controlled all the rest, was my belief in the
philosophic richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire
to appropriate these to myself, whatever the book might be. For even if
I had purchased it at Combray, having seen it outside Borange's, whose
grocery lay too far from our house for Françoise to be able to deal
there, as she did with Camus, but who enjoyed better custom as a
stationer and bookseller; even if I had seen it, tied with string to
keep it in its place in the mosaic of monthly parts and pamphlets which
adorned either side of his doorway, a doorway more mysterious, more
teeming with suggestion than that of a cathedral, I should have noticed
and bought it there simply because I had recognised it as a book which
had been well spoken of, in my hearing, by the school-master or the
school-friend who, at that particular time, seemed to me to be
entrusted with the secret of Truth and Beauty, things half-felt by me,
half-incomprehensible, the full understanding of which was the vague but
permanent object of my thoughts.
Next to this central belief, which, while I was reading, would be
constantly a motion from my inner self to the outer world, towards the
discovery of Truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in
which I would be taking part, for these afternoons were crammed with
more dramatic and sensational events than occur, often, in a whole
lifetime. These were the events which took place in the book I was
reading. It is true that the people concerned in them were not what
Françoise would have called 'real people.' But none of the feelings
which the joys or misfortunes of a 'real' person awaken in us can be
awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes;
and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding
that, as the picture was the one essential element in the complicated
structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted
in the suppression, pure and simple, of 'real' people would be a decided
improvement. A 'real' person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him,
is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to
say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities
have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is
only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that
we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small
section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of
feeling any emotion either. The novelist's happy discovery was to think
of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human
spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which
the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which it matters not that the
actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in
the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in
ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall,
while we turn over, feverishly, the pages of the book, our quickened
breath and staring eyes. And once the novelist has brought us to that
state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is
multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might
a dream, but a dream more lucid, and of a more lasting impression than
those which come to us in sleep; why, then, for the space of an hour
he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of
which, only, we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting
to know, and the keenest, the most intense of which would never have
been revealed to us because the slow course of their development stops
our perception of them. It is the same in life; the heart changes, and
that is our worst misfortune; but we learn of it only from reading or by
imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural
phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish,
successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the
actual sensation of change.
Next to, but distinctly less intimate a part of myself than this human
element, would come the view, more or less projected before my eyes,
of the country in which the action of the story was taking place, which
made a far stronger impression on my mind than the other, the actual
landscape which would meet my eyes when I raised them from my book. In
this way, for two consecutive summers I used to sit in the heat of our
Combray garden, sick with a longing inspired by the book I was then
reading for a land of mountains and rivers, where I could see an endless
vista of sawmills, where beneath the limpid currents fragments of
wood lay mouldering in beds of watercress; and nearby, rambling and
clustering along low walls, purple flowers and red. And since there was
always lurking in my mind the dream of a woman who would enrich me with
her love, that dream in those two summers used to be quickened with the
freshness and coolness of running water; and whoever she might be, the
woman whose image I called to mind, purple flowers and red would at once
spring up on either side of her like complementary colours.
This was not only because an image of which we dream remains for ever
distinguished, is adorned and enriched by the association of colours not
its own which may happen to surround it in our mental picture; for the
scenes in the books I read were to me not merely scenery more vividly
portrayed by my imagination than any which Combray could spread before
my eyes but otherwise of the same kind. Because of the selection that
the author had made of them, because of the spirit of faith in which
my mind would exceed and anticipate his printed word, as it might
be interpreting a revelation, these scenes used to give me the
impression--one which I hardly ever derived from any place in which
I might happen to be, and never from our garden, that undistinguished
product of the strictly conventional fantasy of the gardener whom my
grandmother so despised--of their being actually part of Nature herself,
and worthy to be studied and explored.
Had my parents allowed me, when I read a book, to pay a visit to the
country it described, I should have felt that I was making an enormous
advance towards the ultimate conquest of truth. For even if we have
the sensation of being always enveloped in, surrounded by our own soul,
still it does not seem a fixed and immovable prison; rather do we seem
to be borne away with it, and perpetually struggling to pass beyond it,
to break out into the world, with a perpetual discouragement as we hear
endlessly, all around us, that unvarying sound which is no echo from
without, but the resonance of a vibration from within. We try to
discover in things, endeared to us on that account, the spiritual
glamour which we ourselves have cast upon them; we are disillusioned,
and learn that they are in themselves barren and devoid of the charm
which they owed, in our minds, to the association of certain ideas;
sometimes we mobilise all our spiritual forces in a glittering array so
as to influence and subjugate other human beings who, as we very well
know, are situated outside ourselves, where we can never reach them. And
so, if I always imagined the woman I loved as in a setting of whatever
places I most longed, at the time, to visit; if in my secret longings
it was she who attracted me to them, who opened to me the gate of an
unknown world, that was not by the mere hazard of a simple association
of thoughts; no, it was because my dreams of travel and of love were
only moments--which I isolate artificially to-day as though I
were cutting sections, at different heights, in a jet of water,
rainbow-flashing but seemingly without flow or motion--were only drops
in a single, undeviating, irresistible outrush of all the forces of my
life.
And then, as I continue to trace the outward course of these impressions
from their close-packed intimate source in my consciousness, and
before I come to the horizon of reality which envelops them, I discover
pleasures of another kind, those of being comfortably seated, of tasting
the good scent on the air, of not being disturbed by any visitor; and,
when an hour chimed from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire, of watching what
was already spent of the afternoon fall drop by drop until I heard the
last stroke which enabled me to add up the total sum, after which the
silence that followed seemed to herald the beginning, in the blue sky
above me, of that long part of the day still allowed me for reading,
until the good dinner which Françoise was even now preparing should come
to strengthen and refresh me after the strenuous pursuit of its hero
through the pages of my book. And, as each hour struck, it would seem to