My Petites Madeleines....

I am really excited for this weekend! I am going out of town with some of my best friends to just have fun. With a birthday looming in the near future I feel a little nostalgic, once again...

I am sitting at work, just waiting for the change of shift that will happen in 16 minutes. This is the part of my night when I just sit and watch a movie, or read or just think. I have already done a personal planning session for tomorrow's events, I have talked to all the people riding in my car about when I will pick them up and I have spent some time doing a little catch up reading. This is when I decided to check my email one last time. I remembered that I needed to respond to an email and I did a search for it in my inbox. Three emails popped up, one being a reminder for a FLSR FHE (Foreign Language Housing "family" home evening) activity in Provo... That email dating back to my most recent life in Provo was a "Petit Madeleine" that caused much refection to the last few silent moments of my shift.

During the summer semester I spent at BYU I was introduced to a lot of wonderful philosophies that I hadn't studied before, one being Proust..

"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 shudder 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 on me 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, no, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. 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. 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 unsubstantial, 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."

If you read French, find this is French! I have a copy I can scan and send, it is great... For English readers Go here for the full text.

Sometimes I have those little "cookie" moments that can just transport me to a different place. A place that I loved, but didn't fully appreciate until it was over, now that the moments have past, the summer has ended and the people have been scattered from China, to the Middle East to Cedar City, Utah. Now I appreciate and long for it, my soul is "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."