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

by Marcel Proust

How can one be afraid of cannon fire when one is convinced that it is not going to hit one that day? Anyway, isolated thoughts about bombs being thrown, or about the possibility of death, added nothing tragic to the image I had formed of the passing German airships, until, from one of them, buffeted by winds and partly hidden from my gaze by the billowing mists of a troubled sky, from an airplane which, even though I knew it was murderous, I still imagined only to be stellar and heavenly, I had seen, one evening, the gesture of a bomb dropped down toward us. For the true reality of a danger is perceived only in that new thing, irreducible to what one already knows, which we call an impression and which is often, as in this instance, summed up in a line, a line describing an intention, a line which contains the latent potentiality of its distorting fulfillment, while on the Pont de la Concorde, all around the menacing, hunted airplane, as if they were reflections in the clouds of the fountains of the Champs-Élysées, the Place de la Concorde and the Tuileries, the luminous water-jets of the searchlights curved across the sky, in lines equally full of intention, of the far-sighted and protective intentions of wise and powerful men to whom I was grateful, as I had been one night in the army quarters in Doncières, that they were prepared to use their might to watch over us with such beautiful precision.