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 to be able to deal there, as she did with Camus,
but who enjoyed better custom as a stationer and bookseller; even if I had
seen it, tied with string to keep it in its place in the mosaic of monthly
parts and pamphlets which adorned either side of his doorway, a doorway
more mysterious, more teeming with suggestion than that of a cathedral, I
should have noticed and bought it there simply because I had recognised it
as a book which had been well spoken of, in my hearing, by the
school-master or the school-friend who, at that particular time, seemed to
me to be entrusted with the secret of Truth and Beauty, things half-felt
by me, half-incomprehensible, the full understanding of which was the
vague but permanent object of my thoughts.
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