Page 606 - swanns-way

appointed place on the earth’s surface, and at no other; in a
word they were entirely real. They became even more real to
me when my father, by saying: ‘Well, you can stay in Venice
from the 20th to the 29th, and reach Florence on Easter
morning,’ made them both emerge, no longer only from the
abstraction of Space, but from that imaginary Time in
which we place not one, merely, but several of our travels at
once, which do not greatly tax us since they are but
possibilities,—that Time which reconstructs itself so effec-
tively that one can spend it again in one town after one has
already spent it in another—and consecrated to them some
of those actual, calendar days which are certificates of the
genuineness of what one does on them, for those unique
days are consumed by being used, they do not return, one
cannot live them again here when one has lived them else-
where; I felt that it was towards the week that would begin
with the Monday on which the laundress was to bring back
the white waistcoat that I had stained with ink, that they
were hastening to busy themselves with the duty of emerg-
ing from that ideal Time in which they did not, as yet, exist,
those two Queen Cities of which I was soon to be able, by
the most absorbing kind of geometry, to inscribe the domes
and towers on a page of my own life. But I was still on the
way, only, to the supreme pinnacle of happiness; I reached it
finally (for not until then did the revelation burst upon me
that on the clattering streets, reddened by the light reflected
from Giorgione’s frescoes, it was not, as I had, despite so
many promptings, continued to imagine, the men ‘majestic
and terrible as the sea, bearing armour that gleamed with

606 Swann’s Way