But
since into none of these little etchings, whatever the taste my memory may
have been able to bring to their execution, was it able to contribute an
element I have long lost, the feeling which makes us not merely regard a
thing as a spectacle, but believe in it as in a creature without parallel,
so none of them keeps in dependence on it a whole section of my inmost
life as does the memory of those aspects of the steeple of Combray from
the streets behind the church. Whether one saw it at five o'clock when
going to call for letters at the post-office, some doors away from one, on
the left, raising abruptly with its isolated peak the ridge of housetops;
or again, when one had to go in and ask for news of Mme. Sazerat, one's
eyes followed the line where it ran low again beyond the farther,
descending slope, and one knew that it would be the second turning after
the steeple; or yet again, if pressing further afield one went to the
station, one saw it obliquely, shewing in profile fresh angles and
surfaces, like a solid body surprised at some unknown point in its
revolution; or, from the banks of the Vivonne, the apse, drawn muscularly
together and heightened in perspective, seemed to spring upwards with the
effort which the steeple made to hurl its spire-point into the heart of
heaven: it was always to the steeple that one must return, always it which
dominated everything else, summing up the houses with an unexpected
pinnacle, raised before me like the Finger of God, Whose Body might have
been concealed below among the crowd of human bodies without fear of my
confounding It, for that reason, with them.
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