danny

“The flowers that played on the grass then, the water that flowed past in the sunlight, the whole landscape that surrounded their appearance continues to accompany the memory of them with its unconscious or abstracted face; and certainly when they were slowly studied by that humble passer-by, that child dreaming – as a king is studied by a memorialist lost in the crowd – that corner of nature, that bit of garden could not have believed it would be thanks to him that they would be elected to survive in all their most ephemeral details; and yet the fragrance of hawthorn that forages along the hedge where the wild roses will soon replace it, a sound of echoless steps on the gravel of an alley, a bubble formed against a water-plant by the current of the stream and bursting immediately – my exaltation has borne them along with it and managed to carry them across so many years in succession, while the paths round about have disappeared and those who walked on them, and the memory of those who walked on them, have died. At times the piece of landscape thus transported into the present detaches itself in such isolation from everything else that it floats uncertain in my mind like a flowery Delos, while I cannot say from which country, which time – perhaps quite simply which dream – it comes. But it is most especially as deep layers of my mental soil, as the firm ground on which I still stand, that I must think of the Méséglise way and the Guermantes way. It is because I believed in things and in people while I walked along them, that the things and the people they revealed to me are the only ones I still take seriously today and that still bring me joy. Whether it is because the faith which creates has dried up in me, or because reality takes shape only in memory, the flowers I am shown today for the first time do not seem to me to be real flowers.”
― Marcel Proust, Lydia Davis, Swann’s Way