My professor spent a lot of time discussing that damned madeline in my Literature class (many decades ago, a recollection in itself). I felt the passage was so magical then and fashioned myself a young Proust.
Never happened.
Every memory is a latent photograph and only some memories are "fortunate" enough to find a physical form. When that form was photographic paper, there was a precious uniqueness to them. The digitization of life has made memories a commodity; your ability to compile physical forms of memory is limited only by the size of your hard drive, something approaching infinite expandability.
Perhaps photographs make us accountable in some ways to the personal ambiguity of memories so they take the magic away from the subjective guesswork. If Swann took a photograph of his cookie and studied the photograph years later, he might have seen much of his deconstruction was faulty.
Intellectual interpretation is much more revealing than a physical rendition. And more fun.
@MarcelP is with @MSwann in Combray 🇫🇷:
“omg these 🍪 so good rn all the feels🍻”
My professor spent a lot of time discussing that damned madeline in my Literature class (many decades ago, a recollection in itself). I felt the passage was so magical then and fashioned myself a young Proust.
Never happened.
Every memory is a latent photograph and only some memories are "fortunate" enough to find a physical form. When that form was photographic paper, there was a precious uniqueness to them. The digitization of life has made memories a commodity; your ability to compile physical forms of memory is limited only by the size of your hard drive, something approaching infinite expandability.
Perhaps photographs make us accountable in some ways to the personal ambiguity of memories so they take the magic away from the subjective guesswork. If Swann took a photograph of his cookie and studied the photograph years later, he might have seen much of his deconstruction was faulty.
Intellectual interpretation is much more revealing than a physical rendition. And more fun.
Madeleines always taste good.