Sipping limeflower tea and nibbling at bits of spongy tea cake (in hopes of healing my sore throat) I am compelled to share my love of Proust.

“She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called petites madeleines, which look as though they had been molded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place…at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory…”

-Rememberance of Things Past, Volume 1: Swann’s Way

Interestingly enough, Marcel Proust was the one to coin the term “involuntary memory”. Involuntary memory is a concept of human memory in which cues encountered in daily life induce recollections of the past without any real conscious effort. Hence his novel “Rememberance of Things Past”. It was this Proustian memory that led to great developments in modern psychology, moreover, experimental psych. Pretty cool stuff.