Sometimes the fragment of
landscape thus transported into the present will detach itself in such
isolation from all associations that it floats uncertainly upon my mind,
like a flowering isle of Delos, and I am unable to say from what place,
from what time--perhaps, quite simply, from which of my dreams--it comes.
But it is pre-eminently as the deepest layer of my mental soil, as firm
sites on which I still may build, that I regard the Meseglise and
Guermantes 'ways.' It is because I used to think of certain things, of
certain people, while I was roaming along them, that the things, the
people which they taught me to know, and these alone, I still take
seriously, still give me joy. Whether it be that the faith which creates
has ceased to exist in me, or that reality will take shape in the memory
alone, the flowers that people shew me nowadays for the first time never
seem to me to be true flowers. The 'Meseglise way' with its lilacs, its
hawthorns, its cornflowers, its poppies, its apple-trees, the 'Guermantes
way' with its river full of tadpoles, its water-lilies, and its buttercups
have constituted for me for all time the picture of the land in which I
fain would pass my life, in which my only requirements are that I may go
out fishing, drift idly in a boat, see the ruins of a gothic fortress in
the grass, and find hidden among the cornfields--as Saint-Andre-des-Champs
lay hidden--an old church, monumental, rustic, and yellow like a
mill-stone; and the cornflowers, the hawthorns, the apple-trees which I
may happen, when I go walking, to encounter in the fields, because they
are situated at the same depth, on the level of my past life, at once
establish contact with my heart.
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