Page 100 - swanns-way

ing which makes us not merely regard a thing as a spectacle,
but believe in it as in a creature without parallel, so none of
them keeps in dependence on it a whole section of my in-
most life as does the memory of those aspects of the steeple
of Combray from the streets behind the church. Whether
one saw it at five o’clock when going to call for letters at
the post-office, some doors away from one, on the left, rais-
ing abruptly with its isolated peak the ridge of housetops;
or again, when one had to go in and ask for news of Mme.
Sazerat, one’s eyes followed the line where it ran low again
beyond the farther, descending slope, and one knew that it
would be the second turning after the steeple; or yet again,
if pressing further afield one went to the station, one saw it
obliquely, shewing in profile fresh angles and surfaces, like
a solid body surprised at some unknown point in its revo-
lution; or, from the banks of the Vivonne, the apse, drawn
muscularly together and heightened in perspective, seemed
to spring upwards with the effort which the steeple made to
hurl its spire-point into the heart of heaven: it was always to
the steeple that one must return, always it which dominated
everything else, summing up the houses with an unexpect-
ed pinnacle, raised before me like the Finger of God, Whose
Body might have been concealed below among the crowd of
human bodies without fear of my confounding It, for that
reason, with them. And so even to-day in any large provin-
cial town, or in a quarter of Paris which I do not know well,
if a passer-by who is ‘putting me on the right road’ shews
me from afar, as a point to aim at, some belfry of a hospital,
or a convent steeple lifting the peak of its ecclesiastical cap

100 Swann’s Way