The Proustian Insight in the Digital Age

“And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull 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, 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. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? . . .
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.”
-Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

Thus runs the ‘madeleine’ episode of one of literature’s most beloved semi-autobiographical accounts, Remembrance of Things Past. The taste of the Madeleine, otherwise ordinary, becomes fundamental to the experience of the narrator, because it brings him back to his childhood, and thus begins a process of memory that lasts throughout seven volumes. The beauty of the Madeleine lay not in its own taste ‘for its own sake,’ but in the particular associations it had with regard to the narrator’s life.

I had a similar experience today.

I was sitting down on the sofa of my dorm room, talking with my roommate. It must’ve been about 5.30 in the afternoon. I had just gotten back from work, and, having slept a little over two hours yesterday, I was bound for sleep and weary—much like the narrator in the passage above. Though I wanted to sleep, I knew that to take a nap at this time would have been quite a wrong choice. I had a meeting an hour from now, and other such engagements. So simply resting in the sofa would have to do for now.

I then see something—a metallic, technological-looking object—peeking out from under the couch pillow. It looks like an iPod (I can tell because I see the “hold” button at the top). I wearily extend my hand and pick up the object, and find that it is indeed, and iPod. And when I mean iPod, I do not mean an iPhone, or an iTouch. I mean the original, white iPod—the one that had the “play” button above the little turning-wheel-thingy. By God, I thought, I hadn’t seen this in so long. And it was so rusty—I could see how Time had done its work on this little critter.

Wondering if this thing still showed signs of life, I pressed the “play” button to see if it would come on. Indeed, it did—and suddenly I saw the iPod screen of long-ago. It is black-and-white, backlit. Look at it. It looks so rudimentary compared to our gorgeous iPhones.
But the Proustian moment came when I put my hand on the wheel and started browsing. I heard the “click-click-click” of the cursor as it went through items in the menu. I started spinning the wheels all around, and continued hearing it: clickity clickity clickity clickity… And it was that auditory input which spun me round into a Proustian moment of contemplation—into the feeling of “exquisite pleasure” which brought forth “the visual memory linked to the taste” of the iPod’s clicks. That is, it brought me to my freshman year of High School, on my bed at midnight, listening to the Beatles as I scrolled down the iPod’s menus looking for the next song I’d listen to; it reminded me of that first iPod I had at my home, welcome to our home like a magic lamp. We only had one, so my brother and I shared it … and on, and on, and on. Read the passage from Proust to understand just how I felt.

After the initial ecstatic moment, when some time had passed, I began to think about other technological relics. I thought about the original Game Boy, and its four-bit sounds (Mario bleeping into a giant size; the beep-beeps forming music; the little squares that formed drawings that jumped up and down, and on and on)… And I thought of just how short-lived these new technological objects are. I remember how in the span of a couple of years, we went from the Game Boy to the small Game Boy, from that to the Game Boy color, from the Game Boy Color to the rectangle Game Boy thing, and from that to the Nintendo DS, and on and on. Similarly, iPods suffer such that in the span of three to five years, an iPod can feel as antique as a fifty year-old book.

Which gets me to the subject of e-readers. The Amazon Kindle is already starting to look old-dated in the light of the iPad—and five years from now, the Kindle will most probably be lying under the couches of technological progress, waiting to be contemplated as an artifact—a moment of time lost. The broken Kindle will be just that—a broken Kindle. But to the reader who tagged along with it, it will bring forth a great number of memories, that the reader will surely treasure. But the hundred-year old book can offer another pleasure: that is, while being still an artifact, it can still perform its original function. That is, it still has a story to tell. What story does the outdated, forgotten technological object tell? Maybe Proust can help us:

Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled 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, has perhaps gone down again into its darkness, from which who can say whether it will ever rise?

-Remembrance of Things Past