Sometimes the fragment of landscape thus transported into the present will detach itself in such isolation from all associations that it floats uncertainly upon my mind, like a flowering isle of Delos, and I am unable to say from what place, from what time⁠—perhaps, quite simply, from which of my dreams⁠—it comes. But it is preeminently as the deepest layer of my mental soil, as firm sites on which I still may build, that I regard the Méséglise and Guermantes “ways.” It is because I used to think of certain things, of certain people, while I was roaming along them, that the things, the people which they taught me to know, and these alone, I still take seriously, still give me joy. Whether it be that the faith which creates has ceased to exist in me, or that reality will take shape in the memory alone, the flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers.