This was not only because an image of which 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.
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