In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI_ Time Regained - Marcel Proust [178]
Kindness, a simple process of maturation which in the end sweetens characters originally more acid even than that of Bloch, is as widely disseminated as that belief in justice thanks to which, if our cause is good, we feel that we have no more to fear from a hostile judge than from one friendly towards us. And the grandchildren of Bloch would be kind and modest almost from birth. Bloch himself had perhaps not yet reached this stage of development. But I noticed that, whereas once he had pretended to think himself obliged to make a two hours’ railway journey in order to visit someone who had scarcely even asked him to come, now that he was flooded with invitations not only to lunch and to dine but to stay for a fortnight here and a fortnight there, he refused many of them and did this without telling people, without bragging that he had received and refused them. Discretion, both in action and in speech, had come to him with social position and with age, with, if one may use the expression, a sort of social longevity. No doubt in the past Bloch had lacked discretion, just as he had been incapable of kindness and devoid of good sense. But certain defects, certain qualities are attached less to this or that individual than to this or that moment of existence considered from the social point of view. One may almost say that they are external to individuals, who merely pass beneath the radiance that they shed as beneath so many solstices, varying in their nature but all pre-existent, general and unavoidable. In the same way a doctor who is trying to find out whether some medicine diminishes or augments the acidity of the stomach, whether it activates or inhibits its secretions, will obtain results which differ not according to the stomach from whose secretions he has removed a small quantity of gastric juice, but according to the more or less advanced stage in the process of ingestion of the drug at which he conducts the experiment.
To return to the name of Guermantes, considered as an agglomeration of all the names which it admitted into itself and into its immediate neighbourhood, at every moment of its duration it suffered losses and recruited fresh ingredients, like a garden in which from week to week flowers scarcely in bud and preparing to take the places of those that have already begun to wither are confounded with the latter in a mass which presents always the same appearance, except to the people who have not seen the newest blooms before and still preserve in their memories a precise image of the ones that are no longer there.
More than one of the men and women who had been brought together by this party, or of whose existence it had reminded me by evoking for me the aspects which he or she had in turn presented as from the midst of different, perhaps opposite circumstances one after another they had risen before me, brought vividly before my mind the varied aspects of my own life and its different perspectives, just as a feature in a landscape, a hill or a large country house, by appearing now on the right hand and now on the left and seeming first to dominate a forest and then to emerge from a valley, reveals to a traveller the changes in direction and the differences in altitude of the road along which he is passing. As I followed the stream of memory back towards its source, I arrived eventually at images of a single person separated from one another by an interval of time so long, preserved within me by “I’s” that were so distinct and themselves (the images) fraught with meanings that were so different, that ordinarily when I surveyed (as I supposed) the whole past course of my relations with that particular person I omitted these earliest images and had even ceased to think that the person to whom they referred was the same as the one whom I had later got to know, so that I needed a fortuitous lightning-flash of attention before I could re-attach