Senses and Time

I am at long last reading Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time or, depending on your translation, Remembrance of Things Past. My plan is to tackle the massive work one volume at a time with some other novels scattered in between. My hope is that this will prevent the burnout that can accompany a book that tops out at well over 2,000 pages. I started reading Volume I, known as Swann's Way, the other day and came upon the famous madeleine scene. The scene recounts an older Proust being transported back to his childhood in Combray by a sip of tea mixed with a madeleine cake.

Proust is unable to say why the taste has such an overpowering effect on him. He writes that a "delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any notion as to its cause. It had immediately rendered the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way that love acts, by filling me with a precious essence." As he says, he is unable to say exactly why this taste of cake has such an ecstatic effect on his consciousness. 

He eventually tracks down the memory to his childhood in Combray when an aunt would give him a taste of madeleine dipped in tea. The sight alone of the madeleine he ate had no power to conjure this long-forgotten association. He had seen madeleines in baker's windows regularly since this childhood experience. It required taste and smell to transport him back in time to the boy in his aunt's bedroom enjoying a surreptitious treat. And then he writes, in what I imagine is one of the better known lines of the book:

But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, upon the ruins of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.

Apart from the stunning beauty of the prose, Proust is elucidating something that all of us know implicitly: things long dead in our waking consciousness live on and are capable of being resurrected in a moment. It really is amazing the way our senses--here Proust privileges smell and taste, but I would include aural memory here*--can return us to moments before we can even pin down why they matter to us. We follow the train of a certain smell or taste back into our past and find the linearity of time collapse on itself again (a theme beloved in the things I write about). "The immense edifice of memory" is held by what might seem fragile--the faulty senses of a limited mind--but turns out to be extraordinarily powerful.

*I want to follow up particularly with aural memory and its power with the extraordinary film Alive Inside