" But memories, griefs are unstable things. There are days when they become so remote that we are scarcely aware of them, we think they have disappeared. And so we give our attention to other things. And the streets of this town had not yet become for me what streets are in our usual whereabouts, merely a means of getting from one place to another. The life led by the inhabitants of this unfamiliar world must be something wondrous, it seemed to me, and often the lighted windows of a building would keep me standing for a long time in the dark, motionless, laying before my eyes the genuine and mysterious scenes of lives I might not enter. "

― Marcel Proust , The Guermantes Way