AN IMPRESSION OF LIVING

An impression of love is out of proportion to the other impressions of life,

 but it is not when it is lost in their midst that we can take account of it.

 It is not from its foot, in the tumult of the street and amid the thronging houses,

it is when we are far away, that from the slop of a neighbouring hill,

at a distance from which the whole town has disappeared,

or appears only as a confused mass upon the ground,

we can, in the calm detachment of solitude and dusk,

appreciate, unique, persistent and pure, the height of a cathedral.

Marcel Proust

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