' As for Guermantes, I was to know it well enough one day, but
that day had still to come; and, during the whole of my boyhood, if
Meseglise was to me something as inaccessible as the horizon, which
remained hidden from sight, however far one went, by the folds of a
country which no longer bore the least resemblance to the country round
Combray; Guermantes, on the other hand, meant no more than the ultimate
goal, ideal rather than real, of the 'Guermantes way,' a sort of abstract
geographical term like the North Pole or the Equator. And so to 'take the
Guermantes way' in order to get to Meseglise, or vice versa, would have
seemed to me as nonsensical a proceeding as to turn to the east in order
to reach the west. Since my father used always to speak of the 'Meseglise
way' as comprising the finest view of a plain that he knew anywhere, and
of the 'Guermantes way' as typical of river scenery, I had invested each
of them, by conceiving them in this way as two distinct entities, with
that cohesion, that unity which belongs only to the figments of the mind;
the smallest detail of either of them appeared to me as a precious thing,
which exhibited the special excellence of the whole, while, immediately
beside them, in the first stages of our walk, before we had reached the
sacred soil of one or the other, the purely material roads, at definite
points on which they were set down as the ideal view over a plain and the
ideal scenery of a river, were no more worth the trouble of looking at
them than, to a keen playgoer and lover of dramatic art, are the little
streets which may happen to run past the walls of a theatre.
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