In Search of Lost Madeleines

When my friend P. described my friend S. as "a free spirit trapped in a delicatessen," I knew instantly she was right. S. was more or less trapped in her delicatessen-service life, but longed desperately for more. I understand.

Too many days these days, I want to be writing AND traveling, but right now my travels are limited to vacation time and I feel my writing suffers. That's not to say I like travel writing--most of it is deadly boring unless you have the kind of adventures we'd all like to say we have. But, like Marcel Proust's madeleines, I think the key to good travel writing is to bring up what the sights we are seeing make us remember. 

Does that make sense? It did to Mr. Proust when writing In Search of Lost Time:

"Once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine."

Reading this, I am thinking of the chocolate-bar moment I wrote about a few weeks ago. It also makes me think of being with my friend Dana in Lauterbrunnen when I visited him as a college sophomore. We were descending the side of a hill, surrounded by mountains, and it started growing dark. We were talking about vampires when suddenly I slipped and rolled rapidly downhill, leaving me speechless and leaving my friend trying to figure out what had happened to me.

By the time Dana found me, I was laughing hysterically, thinking he must have felt a vampire had come and gotten me. I remember telling him that and thinking he'd laugh, though he didn't. Dana died a few years ago unexpectedly, but the memories around him are still strong, especially when I'm near mountains.

Traveling or not, I know writers are always looking for those madeleine moments, and maybe everyone else is too? I think it's because we want our lives to tell us something, however good or bad it may be, and want it to mean something more than a sweet cookie dipped in tea.

What I try to do as a writer is to find the moment that trips my characters up, like I was tripped up on the side of that mountain, and then watch them as they try to find their footing. That's what has always interested me about writing; the moment we are caught unawares, the moments we can't explain away, the moments we have to deal with, like it or not. If they make us do things we'd never think of doing, so much the better.

Because though I will always love Proust's madeleine moments, I need something more precipitous in my writing. If a madeleine or two shows up at the end, though, I'd consider myself lucky--with a major debt to Mr. Marcel for showing what they meant to him.

Madeleines and Pastry Photo: Michele Meyer