Swann's Way

of shadows, and could at last be identified by the sound of its voice.
But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none
of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for
everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or
the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts
of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as "seeing some
one we know" is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the
physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have
already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we
compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In
the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to
follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in
the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent
envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our
own ideas of him which we recognise and to which we listen. And so, no
doubt, from the Swann they had built up for their own purposes my family
had left out, in their ignorance, a whole crowd of the details of his