But to leave Paris while Odette was there, or even when she was absent – for in new places where our sensations are not dulled by habit, we retemper, we revive an old pain – was for him so cruel a plan that he was able to think about it constantly only because he knew he was resolved never to execute it. [356]
He knew that even the memory of the piano falsified still further the perspective in which he saw the elements of the music, that the field open to the musician is not a miserable keyboard of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard still almost entirely unknown on which, here and there only, separated by shadows thick and unexplored, a few of the millions of keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity which compose it, each as different from the others as one universe from another universe, have been found by a few great artists who do us the service, by awakening in us something corresponding to the theme they have discovered, of showing us what richness, what variety, is hidden unbeknownst to us within that great unpenetrated and disheartening darkness of our soul which we take for emptiness and nothingness. [351/352]
But ever since, more than a year ago now, the love of music had, for a time at least, been born in him, revealing to him many of the riches of his own soul, Swann had regarded musical motifs as actual ideas, of another world, of another order, ideas veiled in shadows, unknown, impenetrable to the intelligence, but not for all that less perfectly distinct from one another, unequal among themselves in value and significance. [351]
Swann never tried to convince himself that the women with whom he spent his time were pretty, but tried instead to spend his time with women he already knew were pretty. [195]
And so it was from the Guermantes way that I learned to distinguish those states of mind that follow one another in me, during certain periods, and that even go so far as to share out each day among them, one returning to drive out the other, with the punctuality of a fever; contiguous, but so exterior to one another, so lacking in means of communication among them, that I can no longer comprehend, no longer even picture to myself in one, what I desired, or feared, or accomplished in the other. [183/184]
I would find it again, walk after walk, always in the same situation, reminding me of certain neurasthenics among whose number my grandfather would count my Aunt Leonie, who present year after year the unchanging spectacle of the bizarre habits they believe, each time, they are about to shake off and which they retain for ever; caught in the machinery of their maladies and their manias, the efforts with which they struggle uselessly to abandon them only guarantee the functioning and activate the triggers of their strange, unavoidable and morose regimes. [169/170]
...while with the heroic hesitations of a traveller embarking on an exploration or of a desperate man killing himself, with a feeling of faintness, I would clear an unknown and I thought fatal path within myself, until the moment when a natural trail like that left by a snail added itself to the leaves of the wild blackcurrant that leaned in towards me. [159]
