Page 239 - swanns-way

this in every direction. The walls of houses, the Tansonville
hedge, the trees of Roussainville wood, the bushes against
which Montjouvain leaned its back, all must bear the blows
of my walking-stick or umbrella, must hear my shouts of
happiness, blows and shouts being indeed no more than ex-
pressions of the confused ideas which exhilarated me, and
which, not being developed to the point at which they might
rest exposed to the light of day, rather than submit to a slow
and difficult course of elucidation, found it easier and more
pleasant to drift into an immediate outlet. And so it is that
the bulk of what appear to be the emotional renderings of
our inmost sensations do no more than relieve us of the bur-
den of those sensations by allowing them to escape from us
in an indistinct form which does not teach us how it should
be interpreted. When I attempt to reckon up all that I owe
to the ‘Méséglise way,’ all the humble discoveries of which
it was either the accidental setting or the direct inspiration
and cause, I am reminded that it was in that same autumn,
on one of those walks, near the bushy precipice which
guarded Montjouvain from the rear, that I was struck for
the first time by this lack of harmony between our impres-
sions and their normal forms of expression. After an hour
of rain and wind, against which I had put up a brisk fight, as
I came to the edge of the Montjouvain pond, and reached a
little hut, roofed with tiles, in which M. Vinteuil’s gardener
kept his tools, the sun shone out again, and its golden rays,
washed clean by the shower, blazed once more in the sky,
on the trees, on the wall of the hut, and on the still wet tiles
of the roof, which had a chicken perching upon its ridge.

239