When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell . . . remain poised a long time . . . and bear in the tiny drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
I have frequently pondered the story of the madeleine in Marcel Proust’s masterwork, In Search of Lost Time, It’s surely one of the loveliest passages in any literature. Eat your Wheaties if you plan to read Proust whose sentences are as long as those of Dickens! I must confess that I’ve read only Swann’s Way, the first volume of seven. Hmm, perhaps I should round out my literary life by reading the others. Ditto for Joyce’s Ulysses.
Truly great novelists are fine psychologists. Proust was a very quirky individual, but no one better understood how memory works. Proust illustrates what occurs when even the tiniest happening in present time can bring involuntarily to the surface a past experience and its surroundings in their totality. The adult Proust felt an inexplicable, ineffable sense of well-being when he sipped a spoonful of tea in which a morsel of a madeleine cookie was soaked. Whence came this delight? He plumbed the internal core of his being and in one of the great aha moments in literature recalled that his aunt had served him tea and madeleines when he was a boy:
. . . the old grey house where her room was, rose up like a stage set . . . and with the house the town . . . the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands . . . the flowers in our garden and the good folk of the village and their dwellings . . . all sprang into being from my cup of tea.
Dipping a graham cracker into a cup of coffee brings back disheveled old Granny, sitting in the corner of her front room in her Adams St. home, smoking a cigarette in a long holder.
Although we human critters are so richly diverse, regardless of cultural, geographic, religious or ethnic differences, we share similar nostalgic memories. We are links in the great chain of humanity. I say once again, “I am you, and you are me — and we are everyone.” The scenery along their paths may differ, but all lives are the same basic journey.
It’s as if there were a collective, universal recollection that differs only in the details. Our Mauritanian friend who is a devout Muslim has the same nostalgia as we for feasts, weddings, family, and music even though his milieu is that of the great Sahara desert. He missed couscous and told us about eating camel and drinking the water from its hump — yuck! (He’s currently back in Mauritania.)
A Knightstown reader wrote several years ago, “I like your stories about the past. You help us remember.” One reminiscence begets another, and we piggyback on each other’s memories. Parents don’t know what impact they’ll have on their children’s future memories. Bill’s niece, Kathy, sent an e-mail about last week’s column: “I LOVE Al Jolson!!!! I remember as kids Mom & Dad would let us play the old 78 records, & Al Jolson was my favorite!”
My niece, Barbara, wrote, “We, too, listened to the race on the radio. Dad sometimes drove us to U.S. 40 to watch the traffic heading to Indy and returned later to watch the cars heading home. Many homes displayed the American flag proudly in their front yards.”
In those days there were no malls, fancy telephones with apps or computers, and I-70 didn’t exist. It may seem hokey today, but Barbara’s aunt and uncle, Beulah and Crack (Roy) Lawrence, sat on their front porch to watch the bumper-to-bumper procession of cars go through Knightstown on race day. More to come.
wclarke@comcast.net