Swann's Way

mind. He would say to himself, almost with astonishment, "It is she!" as
when suddenly some one shews us in a detached, externalised form one
of our own maladies, and we find in it no resemblance to what we are
suffering. "She?"--he tried to ask himself what that meant; for it
is something like love, like death (rather than like those vague
conceptions of maladies), a thing which one repeatedly calls in
question, in order to make oneself probe further into it, in the fear
that the question will find no answer, that the substance will escape
our grasp--the mystery of personality. And this malady, which was
Swann's love, had so far multiplied, was so closely interwoven with all
his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his
sleep, his life, even with what he hoped for after his death, was so
entirely one with him that it would have been impossible to wrest it
away without almost entirely destroying him; as surgeons say, his case
was past operation.

By this love Swann had been so far detached from all other interests
that when by chance he reappeared in the world of fashion, reminding
himself that his social relations, like a beautifully wrought setting