, 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 Francoise t