Sometimes a vague landmark which I seemed to recognise led me to suppose that I was about to see appear, in its seclusion, solitude and silence, the beautiful exiled piazza. At the moment, some evil genie which had assumed the form of a new calle made me unwittingly retrace my steps, and I found myself suddenly brought back to the Grand Canal. And as there is no great difference between the memory of a dream and the memory of a reality, I finally wondered whether it was not during my sleep that there had occurred, in a dark patch of Venetian crystallisation, that strange mirage which offered a vast piazza surrounded by romantic palaces to the meditative eye of the moon.
Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, p. 666
Not surprisingly, this passage reminds me of the 1973 Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie movie Don't Look Now. I've never made it to Venice even though it's been a goal of mine for years; I don't know if it's on my bucket list, mainly because I don't seem to have a bucket list. Mainly I just think of places I want to go and then go there, without years passing by where I pine away for the locations.
What mainly jumped out at me when looking back over my scribbled notes in the book is the one next to this passage: "Did he actually get a telegram from Albertine?" I feel like Proust's trying to gaslight the reader, while at least being honest about it when he points out that "there is no great difference between the memory of a dream and the memory of a reality. . ."
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