"Presently the days grew shorter and at the moment when I entered the room the violet sky seemed branded with the stiff, geometrical, fleeting, effulgent figure of the sun (like the representation of some miraculous sign, of some mystical apparition) lowering over the sea on the edge of the horizon like a sacred picture over a high altar, while the different parts of the western sky exposed in the glass fronts of the low mahogany bookcases that ran along the walls, which I carrried back in my mind to the marvellous painting from which they had been detached, seemed like those different scenes executed long ago for a confraterntiy by some old master on a shrine, whose separate panels are now exhibited side by side in a gallery, so that the visitor's imagination alone can restore them to their place on the predella of the reredos.
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 860-861
I have nothing profound to say about this passage, although that never seems to stop me from blathering on. Mainly I just thought it was beautiful. That said, I do think that this is another example of the centrality (no pun intended) of liminal spaces in Remembrance of Things Past.
Note to self: use the word effulgent more.
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