Moments from Proust. I. Dreams of Travel and of Love

Albumleaf 181: May 3, 2021 (Bologna)

Thus, if I always imagined the woman I loved surrounded by the places I longed for most at the time, if I would have liked her to be the one who took me to visit them, who opened the way for me into an unknown world, it was not because of a simple chance association of thoughts; no, it was because my dreams of travel and of love were only moments—which I am separating artificially today as if I were cutting sections at different heights of an apparently motionless iridescent jet of water—in a single inflexible upsurge of all the forces of my life.

Marcel Proust
Swann’s Way, pp. 88-89.
Translation: Lydia Davis