Page 127 - swanns-way

fore I could touch it, just as an incandescent body which
is moved towards something wet never actually touches
moisture, since it is always preceded, itself, by a zone of
evaporation. Upon the sort of screen, patterned with differ-
ent states and impressions, which my consciousness would
quietly unfold while I was reading, and which ranged from
the most deeply hidden aspirations of my heart to the whol-
ly external view of the horizon spread out before my eyes at
the foot of the garden, what was from the first the most per-
manent and the most intimate part of me, the lever whose
incessant movements controlled all the rest, was my belief
in the philosophic richness and beauty of the book I was
reading, and my desire to appropriate these to myself, what-
ever the book might be. For even if I had purchased it at
Combray, having seen it outside Borange’s, whose grocery
lay too far from our house for Françoise to be able to deal
there, as she did with Camus, but who enjoyed better cus-
tom as a stationer and bookseller; even if I had seen it, tied
with string to keep it in its place in the mosaic of month-
ly parts and pamphlets which adorned either side of his
doorway, a doorway more mysterious, more teeming with
suggestion than that of a cathedral, I should have noticed
and bought it there simply because I had recognised it as a
book which had been well spoken of, in my hearing, by the
school-master or the school-friend who, at that particular
time, seemed to me to be entrusted with the secret of Truth
and Beauty, things half-felt by me, half-incomprehensible,
the full understanding of which was the vague but perma-
nent object of my thoughts.

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