Proustian Memory
“The reality that I had known no longer existed. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”
I get how Marcel Proust’s (1871-1922) In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) is the longest novel written because it’s an epic excavation of time and memory. While his seven volumes live on my bookshelf, I struggle to read them as there’s no discernible plot, sentences span entire pages, and the prose can imitate the drifting patterns of our own recursive thoughts. However, Proust’s novel is intentionally structured to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary memory, and Proust embarks on an active search to explore his confusion and disappointment of trying to grasp the fleeting nature of time and memory.
Proust traces the movements of memory from his childhood. He isn’t trying to reconstruct the past by force (voluntary memory); he’s trying to depict those rare moments when time suddenly returns with all its former intensity (involuntary memory). Proust captures the way we experience time psychologically rather than chronologically.
Proust's work stirred up a similar sense of despair in me that I imagine he felt in his search of lost time. It’s the despair of how time feels elusive. Getting older doesn’t feel like living more time. Rather, the passage of years often surprises us in retrospect. Proust captures this concept when a sensory cue, the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea, folds a lifetime into an instant, resulting in a surge of unexpected happiness.
I also know the immense joy that comes from suddenly being transported to the past when I encounter a familiar scent, taste, texture, sight, or sound. I wonder what my madeleines have been and will be, and if I’ll ever manage to capture them in writing before they slip away from conscious memory.
However, I wasn’t exactly conducting a deep dive on Proust to experience a madeleine moment that hurls me back into childhood. When I started writing this piece a week ago, I wanted to dive into some serious voluntary memory recall. I wanted to keep a log of the things I don’t want to forget. The things I want to savor. I love the idea of savoring everything. And yet it feels so futile because I’ve already forgotten so many things that once gave me that life-affirming rush, the kind that says, “This is why I’m alive, to feel this.” And even more so futile because Proust is right: our core memories rarely come when we call for them. They strike our minds in unbidden flashes through some unexpected cue. No deliberate effort can recreate the fullness of what was once lived.
Recognizing that I will never capture my life fully, that I cannot keep a perfect running record of every version of myself, leaves a kind of weight in my chest. To me, that weight is grief. And to feel it is already to accept it. To accept it is to allow myself to live.
(Written Dec. 3 2025)
It’s now Dec. 11, 2025, and I can remember that the grief was devastatingly present in my body. But I can’t recreate it. The feeling has entirely shifted, even as I return to the same words. Time bends memory.
I’m not going to live inside my journal entries, frantically trying to memorialize every fragment of my life. I want to live it as fully as the elusiveness of time and memory allows. How sad, and yet how necessary, to relinquish control to the natural forces of time and memory. I get you, Proust.
“Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.” — Proust, Time Regained
Voluntary Memory
“But since what I would have recalled would have been something with which my voluntary memory, the memory of intelligence, had provided me…all of that was dead.” — Proust, Swann’s Way
“For Proust, voluntary memory is “a memory of the intelligence and the eyes, which only gives us faces of the past without truth.” This conscious retrieval only gives access to a past “different from what we thought we remembered.” (Gisquet-Verrier & Riccio, 2024).
In essence, voluntary memory consists of past facts and/or images resulting from a conscious recall process. For example, you might try to remember your childhood at the playground by reconstructing the scene in your mind: the squishy black-and-blue speckled ground beneath your feet; the tiny specks sticking to your hands when you crawled underneath the jungle gym; the pinkish imprints of the pebbles left on your knees when you knelt in front of your pile of collected treasures; the yellow monkey bars with peeling paint revealing the dull, steel bars that your small arms couldn’t yet conquer; the leathery thump of basketballs dribbling across the nearby court; the distant smell of chlorine drifting from the public pool.
Although describing my childhood playground in this way did evoke cherished memories, the facts and images don’t capture the full emotional resonance of this experience.
Involuntary Memory
“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. ... 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. And all from my cup of tea.” — Proust, Swann’s Way
Involuntary memory consists of past recollections, feelings, and images that arise unexpectedly in response to sensory cues. For example, paralleling Proust’s madeleine scene, I might describe the playground as follows: “No sooner had the squishy black-and-blue ground met the bottoms of my sneakers than I was five years old again. An exquisite pleasure surged through me, and in an instant, a lifetime folded, revealing a long-lost summer. I am both then and now.”
I am both then and now. A single sensory cue folds a lifetime into an instant. Hello, little me. Hello, adult me. Where has the time gone? And with this, momentary merging. Time suspended. Goodbye, me. Goodbye, you.
References
Gisquet-Verrier, P., & Riccio, D. C. (2024). Proust and involuntary retrieval. Frontiers in psychology, 15, 1235098. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1235098
