"Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I decline at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. 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 entire body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An 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 - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love had of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and case, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?
I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, 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 object of my quest, the truth, lies no in the cup but in myself. The tea has called up in me, but does not itself understand, and can only repeat indefinitely, with a gradual loss of strength, the same testimony; which I, too, cannot interpret, though I hope at least to be able to call upon the tea for it again and to find it there presently, intact and at my disposal, for my final enlightenment. I put down my cup and examine my own mind. It is for it to discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all of equipment will avail it nothing Seek? More than that; create. It is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day."
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 46-47
And now we've reached the section, at the very end of the Overture, that is arguably the most famous, or at least the most quoted, passage from Proust. But where to start in unpacking this section?
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| New Year's Eve in a square in Savannah, replete with sweet tea and Proust. Why do I live in this Yankee hellhole? |
I don't know if I have a moment that relates to Proust's with the petites madeleines. On my recent trip to Savannah I tried to engineer one. On New Year's Eve I spirited away from the rest of my family and went for a walk. After a lunch break at Clary's I ended up in one of the historic squares, enjoying temperature in the upper 70s, while sitting on a bench drinking takeout sweet tea and reading this particular section from Proust. Memories flooded back, certainly, especially the trips that we made here as a family when we lived in Atlanta, but none of them struck me like a lightning bolt as they did Proust. I've been fortunate to have been in love several times in my life, but only once was it love at first sight. Inevitably it was instead a gradual process, a combination and culmination of thousands of moments and emotions. Maybe discovering my own past will be the same way, and this year brooding over it while reading Proust will take me to the same place.
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