Old days at Combray with my great-aunt, at Balbec, Paris, Doncières, Venice, and the rest…

“So that it and the City of the Lilies were not just artificial scenes which I could set up at will in front of my imagination, but existed a certain distance from Paris which must inevitably be traversed if I wished to see them, at a particular place on the earth’s surface and at no other—in a word, were entirely real. They became even more real to me when my father, by saying, “Well, you can stay in Venice from the 20th to the 29th, and reach Florence on Easter morning,” made them both emerge, no longer only from the abstraction of Space, but from that imaginary Time in which we place not one journey at a time but others simultaneously, without too much agitation since they are only possibilities—that Time which reconstructs itself so effectively that one can spend it again in one town after one has already spent it in another—and assigned to them some of those actual, calendar days which are the certificates of authenticity of the objects on which they are spent, for these unique days are consumed by being used, they do not return, one cannot live them again here when one has lived them there.”