vendredi 1 février 2013

Proust in Cévennes

"The search of the lost time." (Proust, a french writer, who said that, eating a madeleine, a french cake -picture- with a cup of tea his mother gave him because he caught a cool, he suddenly remembered all his enfancy in Combray*). One has the "madeleines" that we can. Mine is coal mines in Cevennes, but I can't recognise anything.

 Mining villages in escheat. My memory 
.



... and the reality now. Sad.
________________


*"The search of the lost time"
 -Marcel Proust- (abstract, the "madeleine")

Combray, the room of aunt Léonie

"There were already many years that of Combray, nothing existed for me when one day in winter, as I got home, my mother offered me to take a cup of tea. She sent for one of those squat, plump cakes called Madeleines and soon, overwhelmed by the dreary day, I raised to my lips a spoonful of tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. At the moment the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate, an exquisite pleasure invaded me, isolated, whose I did not know the cause. At once, it made me seem the vicissitudes of life indifferent, its disasters, innocuous, its brevity, illusory, similarly as love. I ceased to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could have come to me this powerful joy? It was connected with the taste of tea and cake but exceeded it infinitely. I put the cup and turned to my mind, overtaken by itself; to search? not only : create. My mind is in front of something that does not yet exist and that only it can bring into the light. An unknown state of felicity, clear, real. Something in me moves, rises, undocked of great depth, I do not know what it is, but that rises slowly, and suddenly the memory revealed me.. the taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray, when I went to say hello to her room, my aunt Léonie offered me after soaked it in her own cup of tea. The sight of the little madeleine had not reminded me anything before I tasted it... but when, from a distant past, nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things have disapeared, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste like souls remain unabated pasted with the vast structure of recollection..."


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