Cookies, Tea, and Epiphany

"An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, 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 has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, no, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?"  ~Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

"A madeleine can easily become a revelation"

~Lerer, Proust and the Method of Memory



          Ah, the realm of memory:  good times and bad, trauma and nostalgia both.  But how does it actually work?  Our readings for this week explore this mysterious aspect of the brain, from Decartes' animal spirits and nerve pores to Proust's self-constructed world.  From Tristram Shandy in the 1700s to In Search of Lost Time in the 1900s, authors have explored the world of memory and association and, without knowing it, hit upon phenomena science would discover.
          Lerer puts his focus on Proust and the mechanics of memory.  Proust delved into his own memory, says Lerer, because even though he was sickly and bed-ridden, "it was there ...  that he would live forever" (p. 76).  Being able to spend limitless hours remembering, and thinking about remembering, Proust was able to discover how his brain worked.  The famous episode with the madeleine is a prime example.  The taste and smell of the tea and cookie arouse memories from the narrator's childhood visits with his aunt, and modern science tells us that it is those two senses that are closest linked to memory.  Taste and smell are connected directly to the hippocampus, the seat of long-term memory, unlike the other three senses, which are processed first by the thalamus.
          Something that struck me about the Lerer reading was that memories can be changed.  We can lie to ourselves about what we remember, whether it is a beauty mark moving around the beloved's face, as in Proust; or complete fabrication, as in Freud's psychoanalysis of Viennese women.  The "real" memory, the objective view of what happened, is lost forever amid the changes we mold onto our recollections.  What we choose to remember then begins to tell us more about ourselves than about events as they actually occurred.  Thus does Proust move on from tea and cookie to contemplating his mind.
          Another thing that jumped out at me from all the readings this week is the power of association.  Experiencing or remembering a certain moment or stimulus leads the brain through a fascinating chain of earlier experiences related only by how we feel about them.  Proust exploits his own inexplicable associations, such as that of a starched napkin with the Atlantic, and uses them as stepping-stones on the way to deeper contemplation.  Lerer holds that Proust understood that our own idiosyncratic train of associations is what makes us unique, what creates our specific personality.  And by tracing the weave of our neural connections, however strange, we can know ourselves.
          Knowing ourselves by the traces of our brain's associations makes, I think, an interesting connection with Tristram Shandy.  Stearne's concept of the "hobby-horse" and "hobby-horsical nature"  could be interpreted as a path of association so strong that like all roads to Rome, all trains of thought, however far removed, eventually lead there.  If personality arises from neural patterns, than those strong associations, like Uncle Toby and his military fortifications, are thus easy to  define.  And it is in exactly this manner that Tristram chooses to define his Uncle Toby's nature by the hobby-horse of military fortification that rules his thoughts.  This correspondence between the authors makes me wonder if Proust ever read Tristram Shandy, and what Stearne would say if he could read In Search of Lost Time.  Cookies and battlements, ditches and starched napkins, all on the road to epiphany.