Swann's Way

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 impressions 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. The wind pulled out sideways the wild grass
that grew in the wall, and the chicken's downy feathers, both of which
things let themselves float upon the wind's breath to their full extent,
with the unresisting submissiveness of light and lifeless matter. The