A few years ago, we visited Airfield Estate here in Dublin, a working farm that we love taking our daughter to, and I highly recommend it if you are ever in the area. This heritage estate has rewilded areas, a huge playground in the forest, and convenient access via Luas (Dublin’s tram system). But on this particular sunny day, when it felt like we had the farm just for us, we went as usual to say hello to the hens. And then the rooster crowed. In that moment, I wasn’t only in Dublin. I was back in my Romanian village. It was as if my head was split in two, existing in two places at once, a kind of Schrödinger’s memory.
This fracturing sensation of being transported through time is, of course, not unique to me. And there is no other famous literary device that can explain that better than Marcel Proust’s famous madeleine passage from In Search of Lost Time, where a madeleine dipped in tea unleashes an entire world.
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.
Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time
And all from hearing that rooster, did I feel a lump in my throat, and my head split in two, standing in an Irish farm with my daughter, yet simultaneously a child again in Romania. It wasn’t a scent or a taste, as in Proust’s case, that triggered my involuntary memory, but a sound that became a sensation, that became a memory, that became a place. Since leaving my childhood home, of course, I have heard plenty of roosters, but there must have been something particular about that Dublin morning, or perhaps the company of my daughter, that allowed a single crow to slip through the cracks of time itself.
Another Proustian moment I have experienced has a generational flavor.
There is a nice pizza spot here in Dublin, Little Pyg, which sits at number 16 in the Top 50 pizzerias in Europe. I highly recommend booking a table well in advance and visiting, as the surroundings and food quality are extraordinary. But the reason I like this pizzeria so much is that the first time I had a bite of their pizza crust, I was again no longer in Dublin but back in my home village in Romania, eating a still-warm turtă (a version of flatbread; pronounced “toor-tuh”) made by my mother.
Then, my mother came to visit us, and we took her to Little Pyg. I told her that their pizza is really good, without mentioning my Proust madeleine, as I wanted to share that with her while we were eating pizza. And then something happened. When my mother took her first bite of the pizza crust, she immediately said, “This tastes exactly like the turtă my mother used to make.”
I had expected my mother to recognize her own cooking. Instead, the taste produced such a visceral recollection in her that, rather than stopping at earlier layers of memory (when she made turtă for us), my mother was transported back to her childhood as well. The same flavor that reminded me of my mother’s cooking reminded my mother of her mother’s cooking.
Food memories seem to follow their own logic, skipping generations and decades. Why did the pizza crust transport my mother directly to her childhood memories of making turtă for us, bypassing her more recent memories of making it for us? What determines which sensory pathway opens which temporal door?
When we inhale a smell, molecules travel to the olfactory bulb, which sends direct neural projections to the amygdala and hippocampus, the brain’s centers for emotion and memory. Other senses must first pass through the thalamus, the brain’s relay station, before reaching these memory areas. Smell bypasses this step, explaining why food-triggered memories feel so powerful.
And because this phenomenon had to be given a name, it is now commonly referred to as the Proust effect. Interestingly, as I mentioned in a previous article, Proust’s original draft didn’t feature a madeleine at all, but a simple tartine, a slice of bread with jam. His editor suggested the change to a madeleine, likely because it was more beautiful and memorable. We live with the ‘madeleine effect,’ not the ‘tartine effect,’ because of an editorial decision that has shaped our collective memory for over a century. But that is a story for another article.
Sound doesn’t have the same privileged pathway as smell, as it must travel through the thalamus before reaching the memory centers. Yet that rooster’s crow proved just as powerful as any madeleine. Perhaps the proximity of brain centers isn’t everything; possibly, immediate, involuntary memory recollections depend on the emotional weight certain sounds carry, or the way they become encoded during moments of particular significance.
What is striking about Proust is how much he understood about memory long before neuroscience could explain the underlying mechanisms. Writing from his cork-lined bedroom over a century ago, he was making observations that “entered into mainstream scientific thought”, only decades later, as Pascale Gisquet-Verrier and David C Riccio note in their remarkable article, Proust and involuntary retrieval.
Proust made this crucial distinction between what he called voluntary and involuntary memory. Voluntary memory is what happens when we try to remember something, like searching for a name or a date. However, Proust found that this kind of conscious retrieval provided only what he called “imperfect restitution of the initial event” and offered “faces of the past without truth.” Involuntary memory, on the other hand, is triggered by cues such as smells or, in my Airfield episode, sounds, and feels more vivid. Modern research has validated this insight: involuntary autobiographical memories are indeed ‘more specific, less frequently rehearsed, more vivid and more emotionally positive than voluntary memories.’ (see Pascale Gisquet-Verrier and David C Riccio – Proust and involuntary retrieval)
And this is why some memories feel more “true” than others, not because they are more accurate, but because we have rehearsed them less, allowed them fewer opportunities for modification. That rooster moment felt so authentic, while all my subsequent visits to Airfield yielded nothing. Involuntary memory episodes don’t ask for permission to come in. They enter our world and demand immediate hospitality, just as Proust described over a century ago.
I recall gazing at the intimidating weight of Proust’s books on our bookcase. I was a teenager when I first tried to read them, but it seemed impossibly dense (was it my age? was it the translation?). And now, I can only skim how many thought experiments one can have about temps perdu et temps retrouvé, on time lost and recovered, on time ordinary and miraculous. As Proust said,
The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
And perhaps, in searching for those new eyes, I have come to understand that we all carry our own flavors of madeleines, even if we never call them that. I have two names for mine.
First, the rooster.
Since the rooster episode, we have visited Airfield and other farms multiple times. I never experienced again that sense of temporal placement and displacement, now and then, here and there, when I hear other farm animals or birds call. And perhaps I never will.
Or maybe… considering how many years we have been living here in Dublin, the cows and sheep and donkeys have become purely Irish. So, if we were to live in another country and years later, hearing a cow bleating, would it transport me to Airfield? I write to think more clearly. But I also write to remember. Would I then remember not just the farm visits, but this very moment of writing these words? Will this potential future madeleine be the act of writing or the act of hearing? And will that future memory be spontaneous or constructed?
Second, the turtă (as it was the pizza crust, and not the pizza toppings, that triggered my memories)
What was it about that moment, my mother and I eating together, that awakened something so much deeper than flavor? Perhaps it revealed that some memories are too meaningful to be buried, too essential to let geography silence them. We were two Romanians, sitting in a Dublin pizzeria, biting into Italian dough, and we both recognised our mother’s fingers in that crust.