Remembrance of Things Past

A few thoughts ... then a question

1) I took 2 or 3 semesters of French at A&M (and 1 or 2 at Ricks College) from a very eccentric French woman who brought her poodle to class.

No, I am not making that up.

I love French and reached the meager height of my prowess in my last semester with her. Oh, how I wish I had a natural facility for speaking French. One of my most shameful memories is trying to practice my French with Bill Langen in his kitchen. As sometimes happens to me when I'm asked a question while feeling stressed, I could not remember anything, not any of my vocabulary: Uh, je ... parle ... uh ... francais ... un peu, peut-etre ... um ... gotta go!

2) During this class, my teacher assigned us a small portion of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. Nowadays, it's been translated into English as In Search of Lost Time, but back in the 90s, we translated it as Remembrance of Things Past. (Yes, I know my capitalization is inconsistent, however, it feels correct this way.)

Perhaps you've heard of this 3,000 page work, even if you haven't read it in French like me.

(Ha ha - I'm joking! I read a few pages, aloud, in halting French, while struggling to comprehend his meaning.)

Wikipedia gives a helpful little summary that fleshes out my memories from my French Phonetics class:

À la recherche du temps perdu) is a semi-autobiographical novel in seven volumes by Marcel Proust. His most prominent work, it is popularly known for its extended length and the notion of involuntary memory, the most famous example being the "episode of the madeleine".

Madeleines are perhaps most famous outside France for their association with involuntary memory in the Marcel Proust novel À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past in the first translation, more recently translated as In Search of Lost Time), in which the narrator experiences an awakening upon tasting a madeleine dipped in tea:

“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.[3]

3) Involuntary memory is a beautiful idea, and whenever I share it with my students during our poetry unit, they promptly share some of their triggers. In fact, I've found that discussion of involuntary memory is an effective trigger of involuntary memory as well.

Here are a few of my song & scent triggers from my Hill life (pre children, spouse, full-time employment), and no, we don't really get to choose our memory triggers, so sometimes our 'madeleines' may have been insignificant or peripheral things in our lives that somehow stuck around or embedded themselves in our conciousness. Some of the trigger songs I've listed below were never my favorite songs, but they certain connect me to my past lives:

When I hear ABBA (not just the well-known songs, but all of them, B sides too) or smell Watkins vanilla cologne, I am awakened to my memories of 8th Avenue in St. Cloud.

Bryan Adam's song "Heaven" takes me right back to Tech HS, and so does the smell of Ralph Lauren Polo. (Yes, I graduated in the 20th century!)

Prince's "Purple Rain" fills me with nostalgia like almost nothing else and can bring me to tears nearly every time I listen to it.
When I hear "Somebody" by Depeche Mode (as I did at our church youth dance on Saturday), I am transported back to the MC at Ricks College, and I am once again slow dancing with an LDS stranger. The smell of stovetop-popped popcorn also brings me back to Dorm 6 at Ricks College, and not necessarily in a good way, since we burned many an oil-coated batch.


Although I never owned the album, and am actually neutral about the singer, hearing Alanis Morrissette, especially anything from "Jagged Little Pill", is a time travel ticket back to Texas A&M and the Battalion newsroom, circa 1993 or 94. That album must have been on repeat in somebody's walkman because it burned itself into my memory.
Though this is more of a taste than a smell, homemade veggie burgers connect me to Elizabeth's house and her wonderful cooking on Day Street.


Now, how are madeleines different from favorites? I suppose they could be the same thing, sometimes, but to me, madeleines bring us to another place involuntarily (right backatcha, Proust!). They choose us, not the other way around. Elizabeth might rather that I think of her every time I smell a cookie, but it's those fried oat flakes that trigger her kitchen for me!

4) What are your madeleines, and where do they take you?

Forgive the font stylings. I've never tried it before ... and may never again.