Returning to the Past with Proust and a Little Harira
Skywalker: I can’t believe it.
Yoda: That is why you fail.
In his monumental seven volumes novel, A la recherche du temps perdu, (In Search of Lost Time), the French writer Marcel Proust began with the humble Madeleine, a small spongy cake traditionally made in the shape of a shell.
When Proust’s narrator dipped the Madeleine in tea and started to eat it, he became intensely aware of rushing thoughts that brought back vivid memories of his childhood. This phenomenon known as “involuntary memories”, or a “Proustian moment”, is a sensation that occurs when certain actions or objects unexpectedly trigger memories of the past.
Although, a well-worn cliché, and albeit evanescent, “the Proustian moment” can be a profound and ethereal experience. It is not something one looks for; it just happens naturally, out of the blue. Recently, I experienced such a moment. It all started while I was preparing to cook Harira-the savory soup that originated in Morocco.
As I focused on cutting the many vegetable needed to make the soup, memories streamed in my mind. And presently, I felt I was in my parents’ kitchen that long-ago November in Molenbeek, Belgium, when they patiently taught me how to make Harira. “This is more than a soup. Take it with you wherever life takes you,” my parents said, almost completing each other sentences.
The simple act of cooking harira, or a Kimchi, or having a Madeleine, or anything else, if in the right frame of mind, can become a meditation on the experience behind the experience. The separation that exist within is lessened by an inexplicable clarity, something that can happen performing the most mundane of activities.
It is around 8:00 PM Eastern Time in the United States. The tantalizing flavors of the Harira are all around the house. Then, somehow, the past comes back again: the small farm of my childhood, my father teaching me to walk in mud without falling, the damp days and long winter nights in Tangier when the city was still village-like, old and intimate.
For a brief instant the past and the present are one. All the contradictions of life disappear. You can’t go home again the storyteller tells us, but then sometimes you can, even when the moment-as it always is- becomes instantly distant.
I leave you with the thoughts of the master himself as he celebrates life while eating a simple Madeleine:
“An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, 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 myself.” — Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. Translated from the French by K. Scott Moncrieff.
