Time Regained (In Search of Lost Time #7)

by Marcel Proust

these colossal masses of conglomerated individuals confronting one another will take on a beauty in his eyes more powerful than that of a struggle arising merely from the conflict of two characters; and he will see them in the same scale as the body of a tall man would appear to infusoria, more than ten thousand of which are required to fill one cubic millimetre. Thus for some time the great figure of France, filled to its perimeter with millions of little irregular polygons, and the figure, filled with even more polygons, of Germany, had both been engaged in such a quarrel. Seen from this point of view, the body Germany and the body France, and the other Allied and enemy bodies, were behaving to a certain extent like individuals. But the blows they were exchanging were governed by the multifarious rules of boxing, whose principles Saint-Loup had explained to me; and since, even if one thought of them as individuals, they were also giant agglomerations of individuals, the quarrel took on immense and magnificent forms, like an ocean rising up in millions of waves in an attempt to batter down an ancient line of cliffs, or like gigantic glaciers which by their slow, destructive fluctuations attempt to break down the mountain ranges that circumscribe them.