In Search of Lost Time

Recently watching La Captive, I was enthralled by how gently the plot was allowed to unfold, not without event but without judgement. Like in life there was no overt narration or curation that encouraged a definitive value judgement on the moral make of the characters. Watching the string of experiences woven together was both liberating and burdensome.

The film is based on Maurice Proust's "La Prisonnière". The work is the fifth volume of Proust's definitive work In Search of Lost Time. The role of memory and symbols as a means of capturing time are developed throughout the novel and most prominently evidenced with the madeleine episode.

The madeleine episode reads:

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.

The excerpt is a striking example of instances of involuntary memory. In life these moments possess a powerful ability to transport us back to the past. The sensation of slipping on an old pair of shoes - ones which have not been worn since a summer vacation years ago - triggers a muscle memory of a past time.

A silly notion of time travel would be collecting these sensational artifacts as gateways. In another final moment we would savour these captured essences before they too are forever lost to time.