Page 130 - swanns-way

sit in the heat of our Com-bray garden, sick with a long-
ing inspired by the book I was then reading for a land of
mountains and rivers, where I could see an endless vista
of sawmills, where beneath the limpid currents fragments
of wood lay mouldering in beds of watercress; and nearby,
rambling and clustering along low walls, purple flowers and
red. And since there was always lurking in my mind the
dream of a woman who would enrich me with her love, that
dream in those two summers used to be quickened with the
freshness and coolness of running water; and whoever she
might be, the woman whose image I called to mind, purple
flowers and red would at once spring up on either side of her
like complementary colours.
This was not only because an image of which we dream
remains for ever distinguished, is adorned and enriched
by the association of colours not its own which may hap-
pen to surround it in our mental picture; for the scenes in
the books I read were to me not merely scenery more viv-
idly portrayed by my imagination than any which Combray
could spread before my eyes but otherwise of the same kind.
Because of the selection that the author had made of them,
because of the spirit of faith in which my mind would exceed
and anticipate his printed word, as it might be interpreting
a revelation, these scenes used to give me the impression—
one which I hardly ever derived from any place in which I
might happen to be, and never from our garden, that undis-
tinguished product of the strictly conventional fantasy of
the gardener whom my grandmother so despised—of their
being actually part of Nature herself, and worthy to be stud-

130 Swann’s Way