What are Your Madeleine Memories?

What happens when you smell the past?

Marcel Proust was the first person to coin the term involuntary memory, in his novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past).

Also called madeleine memory, it is a kind of memory that occurs when cues encountered in everyday life evoke recollections of the past without conscious effort.

They are the products of common everyday experiences such as eating a piece of cake, and bringing to mind a past experience evoked by the taste. Such experiences are especially strong and frequent in relation to our sense of smell.

Proust viewed involuntary memory as containing the "essence of the past," claiming that it was lacking from voluntary memory. When the protagonist of Proust's novel eats a tea-soaked madeleine - a small traditional shell-shaped French cake - a long-forgotten childhood memory of eating tea-soaked madeleine with his aunt is restored to him. From this memory, he then proceeds to recall the childhood home he was in, and even the town itself.

This becomes a theme throughout In Search of Lost Time, with sensations reminding the narrator of previous experiences. Proust called these "involuntary memories", eventually they became known as madeleine memories in homage to the book. Proust believed these moments literally connected us through time to the sweetest moments of our past.

I got thinking about it because Emily texted me early this morning when a song fragment Lilli repeated took her back to a madeleine memory. When I'm reminiscing with Dorothy, I often think her involuntary memory is better than her voluntary and this might be true for all kids. And there are madeleine bumps and chains too. Memories formed in teens and twenties when we're forming a sense of self-identity are more madeleine and memories with strong emotional moments of bliss are surely more madeleine. Then madeleine memories often trigger a chain of more memories around the first.

The biggest madeleine memory I ever experienced was when I first saw the movie My Life As A Dog in the theatre. It recalled and replayed whole chapters of my life in Grade 3, that I had put away - blissful days of love, lilacs, and learning. Now I can recall them voluntarily but I wonder, would they have been lost, or locked, forever had I not seen that movie?