Today, I made madeleines. In the past I have always used a recipe by Clair Ptak, which reliably produces delicious results, but I thought I would try an alternative, by Sabrina Ghayour, with an additional Persian flavour: finely chopped pistachios. They turned out reasonably well, which is to say, they were a pleasure to eat although perhaps not as visually impressive as in the past. Now I must consider whether to repeat the new recipe a few times, improving my technique as I get used to the slightly different ingredients and instructions, or whether to revert to the former recipe with which I am more familiar.
This is a recurrent problem, as in cooking so in life: there is comfort in repetition but there is excitement in variation: what is new, innovative and unusual, keeps us engaged and alert, but what is old, traditional and habitual keeps us secure and calm. Some of us cope better with disruption, but all of us need it from time to time, not just in our diet but also in the way we feed our minds: what we read, listen to, look at, where we go and with whom we talk. Finding the optimal mix of theme and variation is one of our great challenges in the quest for happiness and fulfilment.
Even though I prefer to consume them with a short-black coffee rather than a tisane, eating madeleines invariably reminds me of reading Proust: not the famous scene at the start of the first volume, Du côté de chez Swann, but the sequence of involuntary memories which occurs in Book III of the final volume, Le temps retrouvé. The narrator – now ageing, infirm and despairing of ever starting, let alone completing his great literary work – returns to Paris after the end of the First World War, and heads to a social event hosted by old friends. He slightly loses his footing and regains his balance on uneven paving stones; he hears a spoon knocked against a plate; he wipes his mouth with a starched napkin. In each case, something very ordinary, albeit unexpected, creates a connection with a moment in his past, a moment that is remembered as one of significant pleasure for the place where it occurred and delight at the feelings to which his mind returns.
Proust writes, in characteristically lengthy, complex and insightful prose:
Yes, if a memory, thanks to forgetfulness, has been unable to contract any tie, to forge any link between itself and the present, if it has remained in its own place, of its own date, if it has kept its distance, its isolation in the hollow of a valley or on the peak of a mountain, it makes us suddenly breathe an air new to us just because it is an air we have formerly breathed, an air purer than that the poets have vainly called Paradisiacal, which offers that deep sense of renewal only because it has been breathed before, inasmuch as the true paradises are paradises we have lost.
Thus the great paradox of the novel is established at its conclusion: the narrator has been motivated to start writing the text that we are now reading only because he has been jolted out of his lethargy by the provocation of memory, but what he has just remembered, and the joy it brings him, was always, as he lived it – over seven long volumes – more a source of disappointment than of pleasure.
Milton’s portrayal of Adam and Eve in Eden reads as dull and uninspiring by comparison with his description of Satan leading the rebel angels into civil war in heaven. It is Satan who first lost his place in paradise but, unlike Adam, he did so with great panache. By contrast, Proust fails to make the narrator’s life exciting, except in those moments when he unexpectedly stumbles across residues of lost time: the rediscovery of his past generates greater excitement than he experienced during the living of his life.
Was our past truly a paradise, or do we choose to remember it that way because what we have lost is our sense of its reality?
History is said to be written by victors; likewise, memory is accessed by survivors. When we go to the archives of our minds, we mostly find what we want, what we like, what we hope to remember. Like the waves of the sea as the tide comes in, creeping up the beach metre by metre, removing the hollows and peaks, the undulations formed by wind, by footprint or by spade, smoothing the sand like icing on a cake, so too we supress evidence of our former unhappiness and dissatisfaction, and deep down below the placid, even-tempered surface of the past we bury the ugly debris of our lives. Our memory functions like a picture post-card, a snap-shot idealisation of a former world that was never quite as good as we later seek to persuade ourselves.
The madeleine, therefore, is not the key to a locked door, which when suddenly flung open, grants us access to distant, long-forgotten truths; rather it is an amuse bouche, the tantalising first taste in a feast of nostalgia, of embroidery, of fabrication, of indulgence. We can, if we wish, vary the recipe – add pistachios! – but we cannot avoid our perfidious predisposition to misremembering.
At least we cannot if we choose to remember alone. One of the great benefits of good friends is that they don’t allow us to get away with complete self-deception: to use the argot of youth, they help us to “keep it real”. They are a necessary corrective against our deep-seated tendency to embellish our past, to accentuate the positive, to hide away the detritus that we have accumulated through life, to forget. They force us into a more honest engagement with our former lives and, thus, with our true selves. When we remember the “good old days” they force us to calibrate more accurately: they are mirrors, lie-detectors, weighing scales. They insist on the re-telling of times past as they were, not as we would like them to have been. Good friends make for more honest memories.
One of the notable features of contemporary Western societies is the mass self-deception of older people: not everyone, for sure, but for many. We see very large numbers voting for politicians who are irresponsible and irrational, for policies that are unobtainable and unsustainable. Rather than wisdom, the defining characteristic of the average older voter is credulousness. Why? Not fake news, but fake recall. As we grow older, we tend to romanticise the times in which we came of age; we tend to forget the hardships of the past and dwell only on the achievements; we repudiate the optimism of youth in preference for the complacency of the superannuated; we endorse heritage and disavow progress; we look back, as we say in England, through rose-tinted spectacles. In short, we gild the past and trash our grandchildren’s futures.
Whether we read Hesiod or Moses, the idea that the modern world has emerged through a process of steady decline – from an Age of Gold or from a Garden of Eden – remains a dominant cultural meme, regardless of all the evidence to the contrary. Decade by decade, life gets better for most people, but most people continue to believe that life gets worse. Progress is slow, costly, tentative and reversable; nonetheless progress occurs, and lives improve. In his celebrated novel, Soldiers of Salamis, Javier Cercas gives one of his minor characters these lines, which have always struck a chord with me:
People today are much happier than they were in my day, anyone who’s lived long enough knows that. That’s why, every time I hear some old man fuming about the future, I know he’s doing it to console himself because he’s not going to be able to live through it …
Older people, in general, like to believe that the past, which they were part of, was far more desirable than the future, in which they will play no part.
For which reason, not only do we need friends to remind us of who we were and, thus, who we are; we also need friends with a good mix of ages to protect us from the conceit of imagining that the years of our prime were indeed a Golden Age; that we were born in Eden, from which our children, and their children, and their children’s children, even unto a hundred generations, have been duly expelled. As I grow older, I have learned to value my friends of long-standing who can remind me how I came to be as I am. I have also learned to value new friends, younger friends – my daughter’s friends – who cannot remind me of anything, but who continue to insist that this is their world and they will do a better job of running it than my generation managed. A well-diversified portfolio of friends helps us to be more honest about both the past and the future.
Friends have another important role to play too: they help us to make good memories by helping us to live good lives. Friends are our collaborators, our accomplices, our company. They see what we see, whether in the gallery, the street, or from the summit of a mountain; they read the books we read and help us to think about them; they listen to the same sounds, in the concert hall or on the wind-swept dunes, and feel with us the tingling sensation on our skin, from the sun and the rain; they eat and drink with us, sharing their favourite tastes and exploring new flavours, unusual combinations, different varietals. With friends, our sensory experience is widened, deepened and intensified. We engage with the world more fully and more rewardingly when we do so together.
The education of the senses represents a challenge, a demand on our limited resources of time, energy and concentration. Yet, to taste, smell, hear, touch and see the world in all its richness is not possible without the cultivation of our sensory faculties. The harder we work at opening our minds to the widest range of life experience, the better able we are to enjoy the world and its diverse possibilities. And memory is the key to maintaining the consistency of our identity through our lived experience of the world: each new experience is valuable in the context of the experience that comes before; each judgement – of preference, of comparison, of quality – is grounded by its relation to other, prior judgements. We accumulate and we sort; we develop dominant themes and we entertain variations upon them; we take pleasure in the old and the new, because all our experience is ours. And when we are tempted to believe that madeleines always tasted better in the past, we need our friends to remind us that they were there too, and that we are wrong.
I am in a gallery in Shoreditch, having just listened to a talk given by an artist friend. Soon he and I will go for a drink, but meanwhile he continues to network, so I wait for him. There are around twenty people in the gallery, mostly chatting with each other in small groups of two or three. I turn my gaze once again to his paintings and drawings, one of which I now own. I notice a woman who is not talking but looking: she looks at the artworks from a distance and then from close-up; she looks carefully, thoughtfully, actively; she is an engaged observer. I wonder: Will she also look at the world as attentively she looks at art? Will she also hear the roar of the wind and the ocean? Will she also train her palate to appreciate the taste of good food and wine? Will she also understand the value of investing in the deep friendship that helps us to regulate the ambivalence of memory and to construct the elements of a happy life? There is only one way to find out.