image for thought, feeling...
by me


“No sooner than the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs, touched my palate, than a shudder ran through me and I stopped. Intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me, an exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me – its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory. It was me – I had ceased to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal; whence could it have come to me all this powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake but that, infinitely transcendent of savors, it could not indeed be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize it and apprehend it? I drink a second mouthful in which I found nothing more than the first, then the third which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop. The potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the truth that I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself.”

from Marcel Proust’s book, The Search