Self-Abuse or Self-Discovery?

Well, both. Can you guess what Proust is talking of in these lines?

Alas, it was in vain that I implored the dungeon-keep of Roussainville, that I begged it to send out to meet me some daughter of its village, appealing to it as to the sole confidant to whom I had disclosed my earliest desire when, from the top floor of our house at Combray, from the little room that smelt of orris-root, I had peered out and seen nothing but its tower, framed in the square of the half-opened window, while, with the heroic scruples of a traveller setting forth for unknown climes, or of a desperate wretch hesitating on the verge of self-destruction, faint with emotion, I explored, across the bounds of my own experience, an untrodden path which, I believed, might lead me to my death, even until passion spent itself and left me shuddering among the sprays of flowering currant which, creeping in through the window, tumbled all about my body. In vain I called upon it now. In vain I compressed the whole landscape into my field of vision, draining it with an exhaustive gaze which sought to extract from it a female creature.

This passage occurs near the end of the second chapter of Swann's Way called Combray. Like a careless and anxious reader who wants to finish a book as fast as possible so that he can jump to the next one, I totally failed to understand what the narrator was actually describing in the passage. I thought, okay, so Proust is describing the idea of solipsism and romanticism and how sensations and perceptions are the best tools with which we can unravel our identities and then I moved ahead. I would have definitely got a zero in Nabokov's course. I always look for general ideas in literature and always tend to ignore or undervalue specific details. But then, I came across this essay in New York Review of Books (God bless these critics!) and found out what that "untrodden path" actually was (scroll down to the bottom to get to the aforementioned passage and its discussion). That's why I always say, Proust should be in high-school syllabus all over. If kids could only read this before exploring their own untrodden paths and unknown climes!