Many
years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, except what lay in the
theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when
one day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold,
offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first,
and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those
squat, plump little cakes called "petites madeleines," which look as though
they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon,
mechanically, dispirited after a dreary 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 mixed with the crumbs touched
my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the
extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded
my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And
at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters
innocuous, its brevity illusory, this new sensation having had the effect,
which love has, of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence
was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent,
mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that
it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely
transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature. Where did
it come from? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? I drink a
second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third,
which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is
losing its virtue. It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup
but in myself. The drink has called it into being, but does not know it, and
can only repeat indefinitely, with a progressive diminution of strength, the
same message which I cannot interpret, though I hope at least to be able to
call it forth again and to find it there presently, intact and at my disposal,
for my final enlightenment. I put down the cup and examine my own mind. It
alone can discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever
the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time
the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment
will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with
something which does not yet exist, which it alone can make actual, which it
alone can bring into the light of day.
*
But
when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead,
after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile
but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain
poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of
all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of
their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
Comments