Remembrance Of Things Past by Marcel Proust (read by Tom Hiddleston) (from Words and Music: Memory)

One day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea... She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines’... And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull 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, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place.

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... I put down my cup and examine my own mind... I place in position before my mind’s eye the still recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.

Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, has tried to follow it into my conscious mind.
...
Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being?
...
And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray... my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea... when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
Source: "Words and Music: Memory", BBC Radio 3
"A journey of discovery, weaving music with poetry and prose read by leading actors."
Originally Aired: Sun 22 Feb 2015

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Видео Remembrance Of Things Past by Marcel Proust (read by Tom Hiddleston) (from Words and Music: Memory) канала Zsuzsanna Uhlik