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.”
-Proust in Remembrance of Things Past- The Episode of the Madeleine
“After all, we like to think of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them. But they aren’t. A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes.”
-Lerer in “Proust: The Method of Memory”
In the first quote by Proust, he is discussing an instance in which he tasted a tea cake for the first time in a long time and it invoked a strange feeling of happiness. At first he could not place the feeling, until he realized it brought back the memory of spending time with his Aunt Leonie in Combray. The almost romantic language he is using to describe this sensation is very interesting. He is describing that although life can change so much after the formation of a memory, even to the point of not remembering you have the memory, things like smell and taste can bring the memory back to light even though those senses are somewhat ‘fragile’. His comparison of those seemingly meaningless but actually quite important senses to souls is interesting because he gives those senses a ‘body’ so to speak. He romanticizes them very much.
The second quote is by Lerer, who actually writes about Proust’s story and writing style. Lerer describes how Proust’s novel is fully focused around intuition. In fact, he describes Proust’s episode of the madeleine cake as more of an explanation of how memory and senses were connected inside his brain, which was a very advanced thought for Proust’s time. Later Lerer describes that now scientists know that the senses of smell and taste are directly connected to the hippocampus, which is where our memories are ‘stored’. Specifically, though, Lerer’s quote discusses how our memories actually change each time we remember them or think of them, which also relates to Proust. Proust believed that our memories were not real, and were instead imaginations of the brain. As Lerer writes about Proust’s madeleine, “Proust realized that the moment we finish eating the cookie, leaving behind a collection of crumbs on a porcelain plate, we begin warping the memory of the cookie to fit our own personal narrative”. Lerer seems to be fascinated by Proust’s extremely advanced ideas that memories are not perfect pictures of events. Lerer uses a scientific experiment known as the Nader experiment, in which rats are shocked when a certain song plays, to support this idea. In the experiment, the rats obviously became terrified when hearing the song after being shocked enough times. The scientists injected some of the rats with a drug that stopped formation of memory, so obviously the song meant nothing to the rats, even after they were shocked numerous times in accordance with it. In the experiment, they also injected the rats that had been conditioned according to the song, only this time, the injection occurred when the song began playing. The scientists had believed that after the injection wore off, the memory of the ‘bad song’ would return to the rats. However, this did not happen. By injecting the rats at the same time they were having the memory, they actually erased it. This proved that memory is actually a continuous process. Memories are not, in fact, stored permanently somewhere in the brain. It also showed that every time a memory is remembered, it is actually transformed to become more relatable to your life at that present time. As Lerer states, “The moment you remember the cookie’s taste is the same moment you forgot what it really tasted like”. This is quite interesting to me, especially since I had a very similar experience just yesterday. For dinner, I got ribs and corn on the cob from the cafeteria. When I took that first bite of corn that happened to have some barbeque sauce on it, I immediately began thinking of summer cook outs. That specific taste brought back the memory of those summer evenings to me. Does that mean I had forgotten the taste of corn on the cob and ribs? Or had I just not been remembering that specific taste in any recent time? (Of course, why would I randomly think about the taste of corn on the cob and ribs?) It is interesting that memories can be changed by ourselves to fit us so convincingly that we don’t even recognize the differences. How can this idea ever be proven? If no one ever knows what a memory first looked like, how can we know it changed? What happens if we remember exactly what happened on a specific day and we have that day on video tape and watch it again years later? Were the memories between the actual event and the moment we watched the tape different from those that actually happened? When we watch the tape is it like a refreshment of the first memory, but since it is the newest version of the memory and we didn’t notice the small memory changes earlier, we don’t realize our previous memories were slightly skewed? Or are memory changes things that are so small that the differences between the memory changes and the original memory can’t be caught on tape? (For example, remembering the sky as a much more vivid shade of blue, and explaining away the more dull shade of blue by the limitations of the video recorder). I understand that our memories are obviously changed by experiences we have had since the formation of the memory, but how long does it take before the memory is changed in our minds? For instance, if I looked at the beginning of this post, will changes about what I wrote or my ideas at the time already have occurred? I can definitely understand and even somewhat notice changes that showed memories in a more positive light. For example, if you had been looking forward to doing something fun like riding a roller coaster, and the first time you actually rode it, it wasn’t as fun as you had hoped. Later, when remembering the event, you claimed ‘it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t too disappointing. It was actually kind of fun’- and you actually remembered the event as more fun than it actually was. This is, in my opinion, kind of an emotional protection. You don’t want to be disappointed by something that you had been looking forward to, so your brain changes your memory to protect you from that disappointment.
The idea of constantly changing memories is interesting in the sense of novels or works of literature. Do certain writers change the memory of the original idea of their character as they’re writing? Does this affect how the story is written and how the reader understands it? I have been ignorant of the idea of constantly changing memories until this week, so I will have to keep an eye out for this in the future and other ways changing memories affect the flow or writing of a novel.
I definitely may have rambled a lot during this post, but a week after you read it, your memories will have changed on it anyway, so you may not even remember that fact.
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