The Nomadic Alternative – Page 241

visits other landscapes, however lovely or exotic, they must seem the ephemeral creations of some omnipotent scene painter, which cannot compare with the real landscapes lodged in the deep sub-stratum of the mind. Against these real landscapes all successive scene shifts are measured and compared with favour or disfavour.

Faces in a crowd are blurred ghosts compared to the details of the young explorer's path. He cannot grasp a landscape as a broad sweep of canvas, but knows it by his own personal discoveries, the shape of a rock, the twist of a root, or the seasonal changes of flowers in a field.

With greater precision than any other writer I know, Proust charted the 'ways' of childhood exploration. The Méséglise and Guermantes 'ways' in À la Recherche de Temps Perdus intertwine themselves with that other pivot of his life, his mother's kisses once denied to him. The two 'ways' were his family's habitual walks around the town of Illiers, and they formed "the deepest layers of my mental soil, as firm sites on which I still may build". He recalled the scent of the hawthorn-trees, later banished by that of dog-roses, the gurgle of an eddy round a branch in the stream and the footfall of a walker on the gravel. These memories survived while "the memory of those who thronged those trodden ways are now dead ..."

... the flowers that people shew me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers. The Méséglise Way with its lilacs, its hawthorns, its cornflowers, its poppies, its apple trees, the Guermantes Way with its river full of tadpoles, its water-lilies, and its buttercups have constituted for me for all time the picture of the land in which I would fain pass my life ... the cornflowers, the hawthorns, the apple-trees, which I [illegible] at the same depth, on the level of my past life, at once established contact with my heart.

The overstuffed bourgeoisie of 19th Century France can hardly less resemble the wandering hunters. Yet no other description rivals Proust's on the way the human mind creates its territory.

An exploring child is inexhaustibly curious about its surroundings and never tires of asking questions. The young hunter familiarizes himself with every rock, tree-stump, campsite and source of animal