Swann's Way
helped me to understand how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the
pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose
the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not
being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer
existed. It sufficed that Mme. Swann did not appear, in the same attire
and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered. The places
that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which
we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a
thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our
life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a
particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as
the years.