Is the shortest distance between two points a straight line, or a madeleine?

Deliberately she visualized the living room of their Flynders farmhouse, then, blurring that bright familiar place, another room began to form: the skimpy parlor of her childhood, her father and a friend speaking late into the evening while she lay drowsily on the Victorian sofa, listening to the drone of the men’s low voices, feeling on her neck the sting of a horsehair which had worked its way up through the black upholstery, safe and dreaming of the brilliance of her own true grown up life to come.

She put her hand on her cheek and touched the place where the horsehair had pricked, and she gasped at the force of a memory that could, in the space of a breath taken and released, expunge the distance between sleepy child and exhausted adult, as though she thought, it had taken all these years to climb the stairs to bed.

—Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
— Martin Buber