Let’s believe, as the wise maintain, that the past is never past because memory lives within us. Our minds recapture memories to bring color, shape, and voice to our past. We are galleries of ghosts.
Proust believed that the past is hidden “somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation that material object will give us) which we do not suspect.” For Proust, the first object that allowed him to circumnavigate his stubborn intellect and bring back a former world was a madeleine, which he recognized as the spark that brought life to involuntary memory, triggering an aching for his past, a desire to experience it again because it persisted in his being.
This awakening with taste works for us all, whether with a cake, a pan of spoon bread, or those bread-and-butter pickles that brought you back to a house at the end of a long dirt road with a swing on the porch and an aunt who whistled as she fed her chickens.
