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This episode is brought to you by a thousand trifling little details. Tonight, we'll read another excerpt from French writer Marseille Proust, monumental, search of lost time, which is seven volumes long and first published in 1913. In search of lost time follows the narrator's recollections and experiences in the late 19th century and early 20th century high society France. reflecting on the loss of time and lack of meaning in the world. This series does not necessarily need to be followed in order. Rather than being plot driven, it is more of a meditation on memories, consciousness, and ambiance. The first episode aired on May 9, 2022, and is titled Overcher. The second episode, the magic wind turn aired on July 11, 2022. The third episode, Miss Year Swan Swan aired on September 12, 2022. A medallined accrued is an expression used to describe smells, tastes, sounds or sensations, reminding you of your childhood or simply bringing back emotional memories

from a long time ago. Let's get cozy. Close your eyes.

Relax your body into the softness of your bed.

Now take a few deep breaths. For a long time, when I lay awake at night and revived old memories of Combre, I saw No more of it than this sort of luminous panel like the magic lantern, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background. Like the panels, which a Bengal fire or some electric sign will illuminate and dissect from the front of a building the other parts of which remain plunged in darkness. Broad enough at its base, the little parlor, the dining-room, the luring shadows of the path along which would call Miss Yerswan, the unconscious author of my sufferings, the hall through which I would journey to the first step of that staircase, so hard to climb, which constituted all by itself the tapering elevation of an irregular pyramid.

And at the summit, my bedroom, with a little passage through whose glazed door Mamal would enter. In a word, seen always at the same evening hour, isolated from all its possible surroundings, detached and solitary against its shadowy background, the bare minimum of scenery necessary, like the setting one sees printed at the head of an old play for its performance in the provinces. To the drama of my undressing, as though all Combrae had consisted of but two floors joined by a slender staircase, and as though there had been no time there but seven o'clock at night. I must own that I could have assured any questioner that Combre did include other scenes and did exist at other hours than these. But since the facts which I should then have recalled would have been prompted only by an exercise of the will, by my intellectual memory, and since the pictures which that kind of memory shows us of the past preserved nothing of the past itself. I should never have had any wish to ponder over this residue of combry. To me it was in reality all dead. Permanently? very possibly.

I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object. And so, effectively lost to us until the day, which to many never comes, when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble. They call us by our name, And as soon as we have recognized their voice, the spell is broken. We have delivered them. And so it is with our own past. It is a labor in vain to attempt to recapture it. All the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm beyond the reach of intellect in some material object, in the sensation which that material object will give us, which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance, whether we come upon it or not. Many years had elapsed, during which nothing of combre, save what was comprised in the theater and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I do not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out, for one of those short plump little cakes, called Petit Madeline, which looked as though they had been molded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after adult 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.

It's disaster. 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 had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.

Once could it have come to me this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savers. could not indeed be of the same nature as theirs. Once did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it? I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop. The potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the object of my quest, the truth, lies not in the cup, but in myself. The tea has called up in me, but does not itself understand and can only repeat indefinitely with a gradual loss of strength, the same testimony which I, too, cannot interpret. Though I hope at least to be able to call upon the tea for it again, and to find it there presently, intact, and at my disposal, for my final enlightenment. I put down my cup and examine my own mind. It is for it to discover the truth. But how? What in a bisse of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has straight beyond its own borders? When it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that, create. It is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day. And I begin again to ask myself what it could have been this unremembered state which brought with it no logical proof of its existence. It only the sense that it was happy, that it was a real state in whose presence other states of consciousness melted and vanished. I decide to attempt to make it reappear. I retrace my thoughts to the moment at which I drank the first spoonful of tea. I find again the same state, illumined by no fresh light. I compel my mind to make one further effort to follow and recapture once again the fleeting sensation. And that nothing may interrupt it in its course, I shut out every obstacle, every extraneous idea. I stop my ears and inhibit all attention to the sounds which come from the next room. And then, feeling that my mind is growing fatigued without having any success to report. I compel

it for a change to enjoy that distraction which I have just denied it, to think of other things, to rest and refresh itself before the supreme attempt.

And then, for the second time, I clear an empty space in front of it. 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. But its struggles are too far off, too much confused. Firstly, can I perceive the colorless reflection in it, as the one possible interpreter to translate to me the evidence of its contemporary, its inseparable paramour, the taste of cake soaked in tea cannot ask it to inform me what special circumstances in question of what period in my past life. Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, moment, which the magnetism of an identical moment has traveled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being. I cannot tell. Now that I feel nothing, it has stopped. As perhaps gone down again into its darkness, from which who can say whether it will ever rise? Ten times over, I must assay the task.

Must lean down over the abyss. And each time the natural laziness which deters us from every difficult enterprise, every work of importance has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea, and to think merely of the worries of today, and of my hopes for tomorrow, which let themselves be pondered over without effort or distress of mind. And suddenly, the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of medalline, which on Sunday mornings at Combre, Because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time. When I went to say good-day to her in her bedroom, my aunt, Leonie, used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime flower tea. The sight of the little Madeline had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. Perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the interval without tasting them, on the trays in pastry cooks windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those combray days to take its place among others more recent, perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind. Nothing now survived. Everything was scattered. The forms of things, including that of the little scallop shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe religious folds, were either obliterated, or had been so long dormant, as to have lost the power of expansion, which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when, from a long distant past, nothing subsist after the people are gone, 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 remained poised a long time, like souls souls ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment amid the ruins of all the rest and bare unfaltering in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of Madeline 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 theater to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening onto the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents.

The isolated panel, 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 weather's.

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 and just as the Japanese amused themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form. But the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on color and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognizable. So in that moment, all the flowers in our garden and in measure swans park, and the water lilies on the fivon and the good folk of the village, and their little dwellings and the parish church, and the whole of Cumbrae and of its surroundings,

taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being town and gardens alike

from my cup of tea. Combre. Combre at a distance from a 20-mile radius, as we used to see it from the railway when we arrived there every year in Holy Week, was no more than a church epitomizing the town, representing it, speaking of it and for it to the horizon. And as one drew near, gathering close about its long, dark cloak, sheltering from the wind on the open plain as a shepherd gathers its sheep. The woolly grey backs of its flocking houses, which are fragment of its medieval ramparts enclosed, here and there, and in outline as scrupulously circular as that of a little town in a primitive painting. The living in Combre was a trifle depressing, like its streets, whole houses, built of the blackened stone of the country, fronted with outside steps, capped with gables which which projected long shadows downwards, were so dark that one had, as soon as the sun began to go down, to draw back the curtains in the sitting-room windows. Streets with the solemn names of saints, not a few of whom figured in the history of the early lords of Combrae, in which my aunt's house stood, which ran past her railings, the Roo, Dusan, a spray on which the little garden gate opened, and these combrae streets exist in so remote a quarter of my memory. Painted in colors so different from those in which the world is decked for me today that in fact one and all of them, and the church which towered above them in the square, seemed to me now more unsubstantial than the projections of my magic lantern. While at times I feel that to be able to cross the street again and to engage a room across the street in the old hostelry from whose windows in the pavement used to to rise a smell of cooking, which rises still in my mind now and then, in the same warm gusts of comfort, would be to secure a contact with the unseen world more marvelously supernatural then it would be to makellos acquaintance and to chat with Genevieve de Bravant. My grandfather's cousin, by courtesy, my great aunt, with whom we used to stay, was the mother of that that aunt Leoni who, since her husband and my uncle Octave's death, had gradually declined to leave, first combray, then her house in combray, then her bedroom, and finally her bed, and who now never came down but lay perpetually in bed from her obsessions and religious observances. Her own room looked out over the Rue Song Jok, which ran a long way further to the end of the street, where there was a green space in the center of the town where three streets mat and which, grey, with the three high steps of stone before almost every one of its doors. Seems like a deep furrow cut by some sculptor of gothic images in the very block of stone, out of which had fashioned a calvary or a crib.

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 climbs, whole tracks of air or ocean are illuminated or sentet by myriads of protozoa which we cannot see. Fascinate our sense of smell with the countless sense springing from their own special virtues. Wisdom habits, a whole secret system of life, invisible, super abundant and profoundly moral, which their atmosphere holds in solution, smells natural enough indeed, and colored by circumstances as are those of the neighboring countryside, but already humanized, domesticated, confined, and exquisite, skillful, limpid jelly, blending all the fruits of the season which have left the orchard for the store room.