We believe, as the wise maintain, that the past is never past because memory lives within us. But we often fail in our efforts to recapture memories, to bring distinct colors and shapes to forgotten images of people and places.
Proust maintained that the past is hidden “somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect.” And for Proust, what allowed him to circumnavigate his stubborn intellect and bring back a world where love and life in all their riches were open to his vast and exacting talents, was the taste of a tea cake, a madeleine, which he recognized as the spark that brought life to involuntary memory.
Proust’s recognition of the cake as a trigger has a valid neurological basis. Long-term memories reside in an area of the brain called the amygdala, which is very near the gustatory cortex and the olfactory cortex, the areas of the brain areas in the brain responsible for the perception of taste and smell respectively. The network for processing and feeling emotions, the limbic system, meanders through both areas. Proust’s madeleine initiated a neurological sequence, taste triggering memory, evoking nostalgia, an ache for one’s past, a desire to experience it again, not because it had been so wonderful—for memory does not exclude grief nor trauma–but simply because it had been and is now gone.
This same sequence works for us all of us, whether with a tea cake or those bread-and-butter pickles you found at a county fair that brought back those memories of a house at the end of a long road in the woods with a swing on the porch and an elderly aunt who whistled as she fed her chickens.
