The protagonist of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time observes with wonder the comings and goings of the crows that roost in the belfry of the village church in Combray, his childhood home. For Ren? Girard, one of Proust's great interpreters, their mysterious flight, first departing from and then returning to the vertical axis of the steeple, suggests the movement of modern history--the crisis of aristocratic models, the growing servitude...