Page 604 - swanns-way

something as profoundly personal as if it had been love, love
for another person—I never ceased to believe that they cor-
responded to a reality independent of myself, and they made
me conscious of as glorious a hope as could have been cher-
ished by a Christian in the primitive age of faith, on the eve
of his entry into Paradise. Moreover, without my paying any
heed to the contradiction that there was in my wishing to
look at and to touch with my organs of sense what had been
elaborated by the spell of my dreams and not perceived by
my senses at all—though all the more tempting to them, in
consequence, more different from anything that they
knew—it was that which recalled to me the reality of these
visions, which inflamed my desire all the more by seeming
to hint a promise that my desire should be satisfied. And for
all that the motive force of my exaltation was a longing for
aesthetic enjoyments, the guide-books ministered even
more to it than books on aesthetics, and, more again than
the guide-books, the railway time-tables. What moved me
was the thought that this Florence which I could see, so near
and yet inaccessible, in my imagination, if the tract which
separated it from me, in myself, was not one that I might
cross, could yet be reached by a circuit, by a digression, were
I to take the plain, terrestrial path. When I repeated to my-
self, giving thus a special value to what I was going to see,
that Venice was the ‘School of Giorgione, the home of Tit-
ian, the most complete museum of the domestic architecture
of the Middle Ages,’ I felt happy indeed. As I was even more
when, on one of my walks, as I stepped out briskly on ac-
count of the weather, which, after several days of a precocious

604 Swann’s Way