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Dinesh ^club

Proust en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Proust in his evocations of memory seemed to hint that the self was nothing more than a convenient name for causally connected experiences. The narrator of his novel ‘In Search of Lost Time” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Lost_Time wishes to be a wrier but despairs of ever finding coherence in his life; or making sense of his many selves that have had love affairs, conductged friendships and travelled widely. In a famous passage, he described how one day late in his life when he was given up on his literary ambitions, he eats a Pastry cake dipped in tea:

”No sooner had the warm liquid and the crumbs with its touched my palate then a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. Exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory….”

The taste brings back to the narrator his childhood in a country town where on Sunday morning he had the same kind of cake dipped in tea. The town and it buildings and people suddenly arise into brilliant clarity in the narrator’s consciousness:

“I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can bear the echo of great spaces traversed. . . .”

it is the epiphany brought on by the cake dipped in tea that suggests to Proust’s narrator a self held together by involuntary memory, the self that reveals itself in particular experiences and can be recreated briefly only when certain causal conditions – smell, taste, sound – are present:

“ But when from a long distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfalteringly, in the tiny and almost palpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. ~ Page 260

9 months ago. Edited 9 months ago.

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