Proust reading

More often than not, memories are encoded through your senses: taste, smell, touch, hearing, and sight. A memory is usually formed by a stimulus that triggers at least one of your senses. Your senses are what make you remember the memory in future. For example, in Remembrance of Things Past by Proust, Proust was served tea with a Madeline cookie one afternoon. Proust remembered that he had encountered that cookie before, as his mind started racing and he tried to place where he had tried it before. After an internal struggle, Proust suddenly remembers where he had tasted the cookie before. He writes:

The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom , my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the meantime, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks' windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the shapes of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness.

Proust’s memory of the cookie was encoded by his senses of tasting, viewing, and smelling the cookie before. He even goes on later and adds that the “scattered, taste and smell […] remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest,” meaning that memories last forever because of the vivid taste and smell that was present during the time that the memory was made.

            This idea relates to almost everyones life. Memories are incomplete without how one feels at the time of the event. For example, each time I drink hot tea now, I think of the time when I was eight years old and lost my voice, and my grandmother suggested that I drink hot tea with milk and honey.