erent heights, in a jet of water,
rainbow-flashing but seemingly without flow or motion--were only drops
in a single, undeviating, irresistible outrush of all the forces of my
life.

And then, as I continue to trace the outward course of these impressions
from their close-packed intimate source in my consciousness, and
before I come to the horizon of reality which envelops them, I discover
pleasures of another kind, those of being comfortably seated, of tasting
the good scent on the air, of not being disturbed by any visitor; and,
when an hour chimed from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire, of watching what
was already spent of the afternoon fall drop by drop until I heard the
last stroke which enabled me to add up the total sum, after which the
silence that followed seemed to herald the beginning, in the blue sky
above me, of that long part of the day still allowed me for reading,
until the good dinner which Francoise was even now preparing should come
to strengthen and refresh me after the strenuous pursuit of its hero
through the pages of my book. And, as each hour struck, it would seem to
me that a few seconds only had passed since the hour before; the latest
would inscribe itself, close to its predecessor, on the sky's surface,
and I would be unable to believe that sixty minutes could be squeezed
into the tiny arc of blue which was comprised between their two golden
figures. Sometimes it would even happen that this precocious hour would
sound two strokes more than the last; there must then have been an hour
which I had not heard strike; something which had taken place had not
taken place for me; the fascination of my book, a magic as potent as the
deepest slumber, had stopped my enchanted ears and had obliterated
the sound of that golden bell from the azure surface of the enveloping
silence. Sweet Sunday afternoons beneath the chestnut-tree in our
Combray garden, from which I was careful to eliminate every commonplace
incident of my actual life, replacing them by a career of strange
adventures and ambitions in a land watered by living streams, you still
recall those adventures and ambitions to my mind when I think of you,
and you embody and preserve them by virtue of having little by little
drawn round and enclosed them (while I went on with my book and the heat
of the day declined) in the gradual crystallisation, slowly altering
in form and dappled with a pattern of chestnut-leaves, of your silent,
sonorous, fragrant, l