Page 207 - swanns-way

so to ‘take the Guermantes way’ in order to get to Méség-
lise, or vice versa, would have seemed to me as nonsensical
a proceeding as to turn to the east in order to reach the
west. Since my father used always to speak of the ‘Méséglise
way’ as comprising the finest view of a plain that he knew
anywhere, and of the ‘Guermantes way’ as typical of river
scenery, I had invested each of them, by conceiving them
in this way as two distinct entities, with that cohesion, that
unity which belongs only to the figments of the mind; the
smallest detail of either of them appeared to me as a pre-
cious thing, which exhibited the special excellence of the
whole, while, immediately beside them, in the first stages
of our walk, before we had reached the sacred soil of one
or the other, the purely material roads, at definite points on
which they were set down as the ideal view over a plain and
the ideal scenery of a river, were no more worth the trouble
of looking at them than, to a keen playgoer and lover of dra-
matic art, are the little streets which may happen to run past
the walls of a theatre. But, above all, I set between them, far
more distinctly than the mere distance in miles and yards
and inches which separated one from the other, the distance
that there was between the two parts of my brain in which
I used to think of them, one of those distances of the mind
which time serves only to lengthen, which separate things
irremediably from one another, keeping them for ever upon
different planes. And this distinction was rendered still
more absolute because the habit we had of never going both
ways on the same day, or in the course of the same walk, but
the ‘Méséglise way’ one time and the ‘Guermantes way’ an-

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