How Proust Can Change Your Life

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disaster innocuous, its brevity illusory.… I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal

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What sort of madeleine was this? None other than the kind that Aunt Léonie used to dip into her tea and give to the narrator’s childhood self, on Sundays when he would come into her bedroom and say good morning to her, during the holidays his family used to spend at her house in the country town of Combray. Like much of his life, the narrator’s childhood has grown rather vague in his mind since then, and what he does remember of it holds no particular charm or interest. Which doesn’t mean it actually lacked charm; it might just be that he has forgotten what happened. And it is this failure that the madeleine now addresses. By a quirk of physiology, a cake that has not crossed his lips since childhood, and therefore remains uncorrupted by later associations, has the ability to carry him back to Combray days, introducing him to a stream of rich and intimate memories. He recalls with newfound wonder the old gray house in which Aunt Léonie used to live, the town and surroundings of Combray, the streets along which he used to run errands, the parish church, the country roads, the flowers in Léonie’s garden and the water lilies floating on the Vivonne River. And in so doing, he recognizes the worth of these memories, which inspire the novel he will eventually narrate, which is in a sense an entire, extended, controlled “Proustian moment,” to which it is akin in sensitivity and sensual immediacy.

If the incident with the madeleine cheers the narrator, it is because it helps him realize that it isn’t his life that has been mediocre so much as the image of it he possessed in memory. It is a key Proustian distinction, as therapeutically relevant in his case as it was for the Chardin young man:

The reason why life may be judged to be trivial although at certain moments it seems to us so beautiful is that we form our judgement, ordinarily, not on the evidence of life itself but of those quite different images which preserve nothing of life—and therefore we judge it disparagingly

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These poor images arise out of our failure to register a scene properly at the time, and hence to remember anything of its reality thereafter. Indeed, Proust suggests that we have a better chance of generating vivid images of our past when our memory is involuntarily jogged by a madeleine, a long-forgotten smell, or an old glove, than when we voluntarily and intellectually attempt to evoke it.

Voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect and the eyes, [gives] us only imprecise facsimiles of the past which no more resemble it than pictures by bad painters resemble the spring.… So we don’t believe that life is beautiful because we don’t recall it, but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated, and similarly we think we no longer love the dead, because we don’t remember them, but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears

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