In Search of Lost Time 2-5-2022

I stopped too soon yesterday. If I only had read a few more pages, I would have read the famous madeleine scene. Or maybe it’s the madeleine moment. Either way, Proust uses four pages to describe his experience of dipping madeleine into his tea, tasting, the associations that arrive with eating the tea-infused madeleine, and trying to replicate those associations with more tastes but failing. 😢

The tasting moment does become an epiphanic moment for the narrator and a pathway to imagination. This mundane moment has inspired him to create. What he will create is unknown. What is also unknown is the narrator’s name and what he looks like. 😠 This is odd because he is so good at describing things in full detail It is as if he meditated on whatever he was going to describe, and/or as if he was in a hypnagogic state. I’m also not sure how old he is. Sometimes he is a child, but the age is not certain. I’m guessing he is younger than ten-years-old as he still craves/desires his mother’s kiss before he goes to bed. And then other times he is older, but I’m not sure how old. There has not been much information to speculate the older age. Along with discovering his name and age, there is still so much yet to discover, such as memory, time, characters, and, I assume, love.

Today’s word of the day is: madeleine (pages 45 and 53). Two definitions from dictionary.com:

1. a small shell-shaped cake made of flour, eggs, sugar, and butter and baked in a mold.
2. something that triggers memories or nostalgia: in allusion to a nostalgic passage in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

The new translation translates Remembrance of Things Past as In Search of Lost Time. I imagine there will be a lot of searching.

I want some madeleines . . . stat! 😋
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