Swann's Way

in the depths of which I felt that I could bury myself and remain
invisible even when I was looking at what went on outside? When I saw
any external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain
between me and it, enclosing it in a slender, incorporeal outline which
prevented me from ever coming directly in contact with the material
form; for it would volatilise itself in some way before I could touch
it, just as an incandescent body which is moved towards something wet
never actually touches moisture, since it is always preceded, itself, by
a zone of evaporation. Upon the sort of screen, patterned with different
states and impressions, which my consciousness would quietly unfold
while I was reading, and which ranged from the most deeply hidden
aspirations of my heart to the wholly external view of the horizon
spread out before my eyes at the foot of the garden, what was from the
first the most permanent and the most intimate part of me, the lever
whose incessant movements controlled all the rest, was my belief in the
philosophic richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire
to appropriate these to myself, whatever the book might be. For even if