Proust Moment, May 11, 2003

That Obscure Aroma of Memory

...all the rooms, they smell like diesel

And you take on the dreams

Of the ones who've slept there.


Okay, so this quote from a Tom Waits song is not the first thing that springs to your mind when reading the passage below, but it did occur to me. Homes, man-made or not, whether of vertebrates or amoeba, leave behind a residue both physical and psychological. That madeleine and tea which sent such an electrical charge through the adult Marcel, and which after some effort he identified with the Sunday mornings he spent with his Aunt Leonie in Combray, conjured a picture which is now returning to him by way of his nose. He specifies the smells which are localized to this one particular environment and the bedridden creature who inhabits it. The passage abounds with Proustian pathetic fallacies, of "smells lazy and punctual as a village clock, roving smells, pious smells," of a winter sun creeping in through the window to warm itself by the fire. The multiple smells are ingredients, the fireplace is the oven, and the result of this recipe is a single aromatic sensation, an olfactory madeleine. Not diesel, certainly, but you get the point.


"My aunt's life was now practically confined to two adjoining rooms, in one of which she would rest in the afternoon while they aired the other. They were rooms of that country order which (just as in certain climes whole tracts of air or ocean are illuminated or scented by myriads of protozoa which we cannot see) fascinate our sense of smell with the countless odours springing from their own special virtues, wisdom, habits, a whole secret system of life, invisible, superabundant and profoundly moral, which their atmosphere holds in solution; smells natural enough indeed, and coloured by circumstances as are those of the neighbouring countryside, but already humanised, domesticated, confined, an exquisite, skilful, limpid jelly, blending all the fruits of the season which have left the orchard for the store-room, smells changing with the year, but plenishing, domestic smells, which compensate for the sharpness of hoar frost with the sweet savour of warm bread, smells lazy and punctual as a village clock, roving smells, pious smells; rejoicing in a peace which brings only an increase of anxiety, and in a prosiness which serves as a deep source of poetry to the stranger who passes through their midst without having lived amongst them. The air of those rooms was saturated with the fine bouquet of a silence so nourishing, so succulent that I could not enter them without a sort of greedy enjoyment, particularly on those first mornings, chilly still, of the Easter holidays, when I could taste it more fully, because I had just arrived then at Combray: before I went in to wish my aunt good day I would be kept waiting a little time in the outer room, where the sun, a wintry sun still, had crept in to warm itself before the fire, lighted already between its two brick sides and plastering all the room and everything in it with a smell of soot, making the room like one of those great open hearths which one finds in the country, or one of the canopied mantelpieces in old castles under which one sits hoping that in the world outside it is raining or snowing, hoping almost for a catastrophic deluge to add the romance of shelter and security to the comfort of a snug retreat; I would turn to and fro between the prayer-desk and the stamped velvet armchairs, each one always draped in its crocheted antimacassar, while the fire, baking like a pie the appetising smells with which the air of the room, was thickly clotted, which the dewy and sunny freshness of the morning had already 'raised' and started to 'set,' puffed them and glazed them and fluted them and swelled them into an invisible though not impalpable country cake, an immense puff-pastry, in which, barely waiting to savour the crustier, more delicate, more respectable, but also drier smells of the cupboard, the chest-of-drawers, and the patterned wall-paper I always returned with an unconfessed gluttony to bury myself in the nondescript, resinous, dull, indigestible, and fruity smell of the flowered quilt."

--"Combray," Swann's Way