| Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray had any existence for me, when one day in winter on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea with one of those squat, plump little cakes called petites madeleines, which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And dispirited after a dreary day, 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 mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder 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. It had on me the effect love has.
I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself.
The same message I cannot interpret, though I hope to be able to call it forth again.
I put down the cup and examine my own mind.
I place in position before my mind's eye the still recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within me, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth. I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance. It must be the visual memory linked to that taste, trying to follow it into my conscious mind. And suddenly. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray, when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom , my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea. The sight of the madeleine had recalled nothing, perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the meantime, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks' windows. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
And as soon as I had recognized the taste of madeleine which my aunt used to give me, immediately the old grey house rose up like a stage set, and the town, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. All the flowers in our garden sprang into being from my cup.
Swann's Way - Marcel Proust. - Tags:boredom
- Location:98007
- Mood:this is good...
 - Music:1980's hits
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