She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called petites madeleines, which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place…at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory…”
— Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 1: Swann's Way (Marcel Proust)
Proust's
petite madeleine became so famous that "madeleine" is now cultural shorthand for anything (usually a sensory phenomenon) that triggers deep and involuntary recollection of memories.
As I'm getting older and have a constantly increasing reserve of stored memories to tap into, I'm finding that this phenomenon happens to me more and more, and especially with the senses of taste and smell. (Google "
olfaction and memory" and you'll be paralyzed by the volume of current academic research on smell as a memory trigger.)
Yesterday it happened to me again. This time, music was the trigger.
I had stumbled across a good sale at a music store online and bought, among other things, copies of "Murmur" and "Reckoning", R.E.M.'s first two full-length albums on
I.R.S. Records.
As a good alternative rock fan who was in high school and college down in North Carolina in the early 1980s when these records first came out -- compact discs were
new, people; we still bought and played these things on
vinyl -- I literally wore out more than one copy of each record.
But I hadn't listened to these songs straight through, in album order (as I must have done countless times in various altered states) for years and years.
When I did -- yesterday morning, in my office, as it happens -- twenty-five years melted away in an instant.
And I was, just for a moment or two, no longer sitting in an office in a high-rent Manhattan skyscraper.
No. I was perched on the old couch in my crappy little apartment
on Rosemary Street in Chapel Hill, with a glass of
cheap Portuguese wine in my hand, surrounded by long-absent friends, in the fullness of deep and involuntary memory.
