…that Proust has all those chapters on Place-Names? If so, I don’t think you’re going to like this post, so best not to read on lol!
Are you still reading? Okay- here’s my thought. Or rather, here’s a hint in the picture below:
A pretty sight. One I think I should use on some of our dessert buffets (in my real life I’m a caterer!)
But seriously, I’m including it here as the closest thing I can find to a tower that involves Madeleines. Because I can’t stop thinking about the fact that the root of Madeleine is Magdala, which means Tower. I know it could also refer to Mary Magdalene, who came from Magdala. But I think in this case it’s about a Place and not a Name, hence Magdala. I’ve been thinking about the root of Madeleine for years, trying to figure out if there’s anything there.
Yesterday, while taking a walk, I had the thought that maybe Proust used a madeleine instead of a biscuit (the cookie he first used in writing the scene) because a tower was more significant. Maybe he was making a comment about clocktowers and time. Maybe he was saying that when he dipped his Madeleine in tea, he was essentially dissolving the boundaries of time (the tower) and accessing a timeless state of involuntary memory.
I know it’s far-fetched. I just can’t stop thinking about it and putting it in the context of the end of the novel, after he’s been to the Bal des Têtes and seen how old his friends and acquaintances are, and has had that scene in the library where all the epiphanies comes together, the lead epiphany of course being the Madeleine dipped in tea. And then I was thinking about the words I always return to – at the very end of the novel:
I now understand why the Duc de Guermantes had tottered when he got up, trembling like a leaf on the hardly approachable summit of his eighty-three years, as though men were perched upon living stilts which keep on growing, reaching the height of church-towers, until walking becomes difficult and dangerous and, at last, they fall. I was terrified that my own were already so high beneath me and I did not think I was strong enough to retain for long a past that went back so far and that I bore within me so painfully. If at least, time enough were allotted to me to accomplish my work, I would not fail to mark it with the seal of Time. I would therein describe men, if need be, as monsters occupying a place in Time infiinitely more important than the restricted one reserved for them in space, a place, on the contrary, prolonged immeasurably since, simultaneously touching widely separated years and the distant periods they have lived through- between which so many days have ranged themselves – they stand like giants immersed in Time.
Picture it. We’ve arrived atop our pedestal, the years having passed on our narrow perch, the clock ticking away, the bells signaling hour upon hour.The tower is habit, age, everything we know. We’re hardened, crusty around the edges. We’ve been there, done that. We can’t remember the past. We’re too far away from it. And then one day, who knows why, we’re able to find an entry point to a long-past memory of childhood. The tower crumbles, or is dissolved through the fluidity of our thinking. And so we are able to bypass time, the ticking of the clock, and enter into a timeless state. We’re not bound by reality, by structures, by bricks and mortar, or by time. We’re just there in spirit and memory.
Or rather, memory has its way and becomes more substantial, grow solid, as the mundane and habitual realities of our present moment fade away.
I’m picturing the way a Turner painting looks, or the Monet paintings of the Rouen cathedral.
Anyway, that’s how I’m feeling about it today. Proust does that to you!