Esther yearned to return to Iran to recapture for a
moment the self that she had been long ago. She
wanted to enter the house and garden in which she
used to live in her youth. But that would have
been a most hazardous pilgrimage, which might end in disappointment
as in success. It is in ourselves that we should
rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different
years. We cannot escape reality but we can only
know reality in ourselves. Inside our minds. It was Esther’s
fate to pursue phantoms. Though phantoms prove safer than reality.
______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.
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