hich 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 diff