Certainly the Swann who was a familiar figure in all the clubs
of those days differed hugely from, the Swann created in my great-aunt's
mind when, of an evening, in our little garden at Combray, after the two
shy peals had sounded from the gate, she would vitalise, by injecting into
it everything she had ever heard about the Swann family, the vague and
unrecognisable shape which began to appear, with my grandmother in its
wake, against a background of shadows, and could at last be identified by
the sound of its voice. But then, even in the most insignificant details
of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole,
which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in
an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created
by the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as
"seeing some one we know" is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We
pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we
have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we
compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.
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