AN INTERLUDE...

After all the science in this blog I thought I would offer you an interlude—a paean to the tastes of tea and memory—courtesy of Marcel Proust (translation mine). Will be back to science in the next post, as I explain why Proust had this experience.

The Madeleine Moment

From Du côté de chez Swann by Marcel Proust

…and shortly thereafter, mechanically, loaded down by the dreary day and the prospect of a sad tomorrow, I brought to my lips a spoonful of tea into which I had let a piece of madeleine soften.  But at the very instant that the mouthful mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I shuddered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening in me.  A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated, without notion of its cause.  It immediately rendered all the vicissitudes of life unimportant, its disasters harmless, its brevity illusory…I stopped feeling mediocre, contingent, mortal.  Where could this powerful joy have come from?  I felt that it was linked to the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it also infinitely outstripped the taste, was not of the same nature.

…I put down my cup and turned to my mind.  It was up to my mind to find the truth.  But how?  Grave uncertainty.  Every time the mind feels itself outstripped by its own self; when he, the searcher, is at the same time the cryptic country which he must search…Search?  Not only search: create.  He is facing something that isn’t yet, that only he can make real and bring to light.

…Of course, what vibrates like this deep inside me must be the image, the visual memory, which, linked to the flavor, tries to follow the flavor to me. 
…And suddenly the memory appeared to me.  The taste was of the little madeleine that…my aunt Leonie offered me after dunking it into her tea.

...But, when nothing remains of a remote past, after the death of beings, after the destruction of things, only smell and flavor, more frail but more lively, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, only they last for long, like ghosts, to be recalled, waiting, hoping (on the ruins of all the rest)  to carry, unbowed, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.

…and right away the old gray house on the street where she had her room, came to my mind like a stage set, attaching itself to the little pavilion …and with the house came the town, the Square where they sent me before lunch, the streets where I ran errands from morning to night and in all weather, and the paths one took when the weather was good…all the flowers of our garden and those on the grounds belonging to Mr. Swann, and the waterlilies of the Vivonne, and the good folk of the village and their small homes and the church and all Combray and its environs, all that which could take form and solidity, emerged, town and gardens together, from my cup of tea.