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| All Images: West Leicester, March 2022 |
"But if these names absorbed for ever the image I had of these towns, it was only by transforming that image, by subjecting its reappearance in me to their own laws; in consequence of this they made it more beautiful, but also more different from what the towns of Normandy or Tuscany could be in reality, and, by increasing the arbitrary joys of my imagination, aggravated the future disappointment of my travels. They exalted the idea I was forming of certain places on earth, by making them more particular, consequently more real. I did not at the time represent to myself cities, landscapes, monuments as more or less pleasant pictures, cut out here and there from the same material, but each of them as an unknown thing, different in essence from the others, a thing for which my soul thirsted and which it would profit from knowing." [1.]
"And, even though the motive for my exiharation was a desire for artistic delights, the guidebooks sustained it even more than the books about aesthetics, and still more than the guidebooks, the railway timetable." [2.]
[1. & 2.]: Marcel Proust, 'In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1, The Way By Swann's' Part III: 'Place Names: The Name', (Trans. Lydia Davis), London, Penguin Books, 1913/2002
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