Watching
Swann's face while he listened to the phrase, one would have said that he
was inhaling an anaesthetic which allowed him to breathe more deeply. And
the pleasure which the music gave him, which was shortly to create in him
a real longing, was in fact closely akin, at such moments, to the pleasure
which he would have derived from experimenting with perfumes, from
entering into contract with a world for which we men were not created,
which appears to lack form because our eyes cannot perceive it, to lack
significance because it escapes our intelligence, to which we may attain
by way of one sense only. Deep repose, mysterious refreshment for
Swann,--for him whose eyes, although delicate interpreters of painting,
whose mind, although an acute observer of manners, must bear for ever the
indelible imprint of the barrenness of his life,--to feel himself
transformed into a creature foreign to humanity, blinded, deprived of his
logical faculty, almost a fantastic unicorn, a chimaera-like creature
conscious of the world through his two ears alone. And as,
notwithstanding, he sought in the little phrase for a meaning to which his
intelligence could not descend, with what a strange frenzy of intoxication
must he strip bare his innermost soul of the whole armour of reason, and
make it pass, unattended, through the straining vessel, down into the dark
filter of sound.
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