How Proust Can Change Your Life

Before he tasted the legendary tea and madeleine, the narrator was not devoid of memories of his childhood. It wasn’t as though he had forgotten where in France he went on holiday as a child (Combray or Clermont-Ferrand?), what the river was called (Vivonne or Varonne?), and with which relative he had stayed (Aunt Léonie or Lilie?). Yet these memories were lifeless because they lacked the equivalent of the touches of the good painter, the awareness of light falling across Combray’s central square in mid-afternoon, the smell of Aunt Léonie’s bedroom, the moistness of the air on the banks of the Vivonne, the sound of the garden bell, and the aroma of fresh asparagus for lunch—details that suggest it would be more accurate to describe the madeleine as provoking a moment of appreciation rather than mere recollection.

Voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect and the eyes, [gives] us only imprecise facsimiles of the past which no more resemble it than pictures by bad painters resemble the spring.… So we don’t believe that life is beautiful because we don’t recall it, but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated, and similarly we think we no longer love the dead, because we don’t remember them, but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.

The reason why life may be judged to be trivial although at certain moments it seems to us so beautiful is that we form our judgement, ordinarily, not on the evidence of life itself but of those quite different images which preserve nothing of life—and therefore we judge it disparagingly.

If the incident with the madeleine cheers the narrator, it is because it helps him realize that it isn’t his life that has been mediocre so much as the image of it he possessed in memory

Like much of his life, the narrator’s childhood has grown rather vague in his mind since then, and what he does remember of it holds no particular charm or interest. Which doesn’t mean it actually lacked charm; it might just be that he has forgotten what happened. And it is this failure that the madeleine now addresses. By a quirk of physiology, a cake that has not crossed his lips since childhood, and therefore remains uncorrupted by later associations, has the ability to carry him back to Combray days, introducing him to a stream of rich and intimate memories

To meet an author whose books one has enjoyed must, in this view, necessarily be a disappointment (“It’s true that there are people who are superior to their books, but that’s because their books are not Books”), because such a meeting can only reveal a person as he exists within, and finds himself subject to, the limitations of time

there are persuasive reasons for calling a loved one Plouplou, Missou, or poor little wolf

Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us

A person who invariably describes heavy rain with the phrase “Il pleut des cordes” can be accused of neglecting the real diversity of rain showers,

The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun is often on fire at sunset and the moon discreet, but if we keep saying this every time we encounter a sun or a moon, we will end up believing that this is the last rather than the first word to be said on the subject. Clichés are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface. And if this matters, it is because the way we speak is ultimately linked to the way we feel