In this note I try to show how proust refers to distinctions between reality and imaginations in
Swan`s way: volume I of “In search of lost time”
In the last sentences of volume I when the narrator describes the Bois de Boulogne he says:
I should have required also that they be the same women, those whose costume interested me because at a time when I still had faith, my imagination had individualized them and had provided each of them with a legend … he continues with lamentation : they had long fled, and still I stood vainly questioning the deserted paths. Then he continues:
… and helped me to understand how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one`s memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. the reality I had known no longer existed ...
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