What Kind of Memories
Reading time - 5min
Proust’s madeleine. Known anecdote of 20th century literature. Popularly known, at least how it was explained to me by someone at some point (I do not recall the moment I was first introduced to it), as something you refer to when something, a taste, smell, in broader terms an experience, brings you back to a memory. Evokes a memory. “It’s like Proust’s madeleine” one would say when struck by a memory evoked by an outside stimulus.
Never having read Proust, and never thinking I would, I naively used this smart sounding anecdote when I thought it was appropriate to use. I figured the chance that one of my peers knew who Proust even was where slim and I wouldn’t be called out if I was misusing it.
It’s incredulous how convinced I was about myself and my future when I was in my late teens, never would I have imagined that I would be finding myself, a decade or so later, at page 40 something of Swann’s Way, Proust’s first volume of his 12-volume saga (and likely the only one I’ll ever read). Here it was, the infamous madeleine part. Expectations were high as I meticulously read every sentence. And then re-read it… thought of it, and re-read it again… I was surprised to find out that a) it wasn’t as simple as it was colloquially described (on second thought I probably shouldn’t have been surprised by that), and b) the madeleine that reminds him of his aunt’s madeleines and with it the whole world around the countryside home in Combray that he had forgotten, is not the most relevant part. The revealing piece in that passage is his distinction between two types of memories.
He distinguishes between a lived memory, firsthand recollection, and a voluntary memory, the memory of the intelligence. The latter is only, “information of the past but that preserves nothing of the past itself.” It’s the memory that you remember the story of the time when, but you do not recall your being in the moment. It doesn’t feel authentic, it doesn’t feel yours when you recount it. The former is the lived memory, the one you feel in your chest, the one that is feeling before it becomes an image, the one that at first is hard to put into focus.
The lived past is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach. Proust says, and I agree, that it’s only by chance that we encounter some material object from which we derive sensations that reignite a past that was previously out of reach to our mind. I’ve identified two conditions for this chance:
1. An extended period of time where you have not encountered this sensation since the memory it evokes.
2. The clarity of mind in the moment to pay attention to the feeling of a forgotten past rising within you.
This feeling is powerful. It transcends time. It gives you a glimpse into a fourth dimension (as I understand it). For a brief moment that feeling takes over and you leave the linearity of time and its doom. You feel the closest thing to infinity.
This distinction was most revealing. The beauty in reading is that sometimes you come across passages that say eloquently what you have felt (or feel), but have never been able to articulate, and have thus stayed in limbo between your conscious and subconscious mind.
Scent has done this to me a couple of times in the past years. It was forceful, the way the memory just rose from within and slapped me in the face, saying, “here I am remember me? Why have you hidden me all this time.” It was instant, I smelled a travel sample of the Fleur de Peau fragrance from diptyque and the Kythira summer breeze blew the dry air threw the thorny bushes into the face of my 9 year old self. The three girls who we would go on vacation with every year, two daughters of my parents friends and a cousin of theirs, were standing next to me, at the top of the hill behind the house we had rented. There was a small cemetery where they used to tell me stories about ghosts and how one of the girls saw her upstairs neighbor fall down the atrium of her building, she hadn’t told anyone because she didn’t want her parents to be alarmed, but she had confided in us. I remember my mom’s young and happy face. I remember the feeling of being a kid, free, naïve, your small perfect reality with your perfect family, with your little desires and your futile troubles. I hadn’t felt this simple joy since my parents separated.
Another time was not long ago. I had attended an event where they gave out a yellow printed paper sleeve with a poorly sealed free sample of The Carlyle fragrance from D.S. & Durga. When I got home, I put the sample in my travel bag. Weeks later I was getting ready for a trip, and I opened the travel bag to put my toothbrush in, suddenly I felt a heaviness in my stomach, the same you feel when you get the urge to cry. I was in the old noisy elevator where my grandfather and I would look at each other in the mirror to see who was taller. He promised me 100 euros when I would grow to surpass him. Closing the elevator floors behind me onto the fourth floor, the front door was open and he was waiting for me smiling with his chinky eyes and open arms. I gave him a big strong hug over the usual robe he had on and the smell of his old man crusty head, of his clothes, it was all there, so vivid. I took another deep breath and I felt I was smelling his office room. I sensed all the love he had given me, the sacrifices I wasn’t thankful for at the time, the feeling of safety I had in his arms. It was all in my travel bag. The perfume had leaked and had blended with the paper to give it the slight alteration it needed to awaken this dormant memory. I haven’t seen my nonno in 8 years.
I can see how a memory like that could begin a novel.
If these words ring true with you too, I’d love to learn about your moment of transcendence.
