Page 126 - swanns-way

up their image in our memory, but gives us a guarantee that
they do really exist, that they are close around us, immedi-
ately accessible.
This dim freshness of my room was to the broad daylight
of the street what the shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to
say, equally luminous, and presented to my imagination the
entire panorama of summer, which my senses, if I had been
out walking, could have tasted and enjoyed in fragments
only; and so was quite in harmony with my state of repose,
which (thanks to the adventures related in my books, which
had just excited it) bore, like a hand reposing motionless in
a stream of running water, the shock and animation of a
torrent of activity and life.
But my grandmother, even if the weather, after growing
too hot, had broken, and a storm, or just a shower, had burst
over us, would come up and beg me to go outside. And as I
did not wish to leave off my book, I would go on with it in
the garden, under the chestnut-tree, in a little sentry-box of
canvas and matting, in the farthest recesses of which I used
to sit and feel that I was hidden from the eyes of anyone who
might be coming to call upon the family.
And then my thoughts, did not they form a similar sort
of hiding-hole, in the depths of which I felt that I could bury
myself and remain invisible even when I was looking at what
went on outside? When I saw any external object, my con-
sciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me
and it, enclosing it in a slender, incorporeal outline which
prevented me from ever coming directly in contact with the
material form; for it would volatilise itself in some way be-

126 Swann’s Way