Finding Time Again: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 7 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Marcel Proust

There are, of course, many other errors of the senses, and we have seen how various episodes of this narrative had proved this to me, which falsify our perception of the real appearance of the world. But where necessary, by doing everything I could to give the most exact transcription, I would be able to keep the location of sounds unchanged, to abstain from detaching them from their cause, besides which the intellect situates them only after the event, even though to make the rain sing gently in the middle of the room and to make the bubbling of our tisane fall torrentially in the courtyard ought, after all, to be no more disconcerting than what painters have done so often when they have depicted, very close or very far away, depending on how the laws of perspective, the intensity of color and our first illusory glance make them appear to us, a sail or a peak, which the rational mind will then relocate, sometimes across enormous distances. I might, even though the error would be more serious, continue the general practice of adding features to the face of a passerby, although instead of a nose, cheeks and a chin, there should not really be anything except an empty space over which would flicker, at most, the reflection of our desires. And even if I did not have the leisure to prepare, and this was a much more important matter, the hundred masks which ought properly to be attached to a single face, if only because of all the eyes that see it and the different meanings they...