This week I really have had a bit of insight into the french surrealist stuff I have been reading this year. Walking around a city three years after being here for three months, places have taken on meaning and beauty and significance through their relationship to my experiences then and now. New places are beautiful in themselves - like the 'banal object' Naomi Segal talks about in Proust; ordinary things can blow you away by their very ordinariness - but more than this, by the part they play in a web of associations and thoughts and feelings in your own self.