Shiny Marble "Thought-Thing"

I was driving into work this morning when I was hit with my very first, bona-fide "Proustian moment". I thought I already had a few of these in my lifetime but boy, was I wrong. Way wrong. One minute I was driving along absentmindedly counting the chores of the day and then...I hear a few notes from a distant song on the radio and then...WHAM! It's 1983. I'm 16.

Let's stop for a quick moment. I realize that many of you have no idea what a "Proustian moment" is. So let me briefly explain. Marcel Proust was a French writer from the early nineteenth century. His book, In Search of Lost Time, is considered by many to be the finest work of fiction ever written,  starting a trend of character driven novels (versus the dominating concept of his day, which was plot driven novels like those by Tolstoy) . Within its 3200 pages the protagonist navigates a labyrinth of some 2000 characters, studying the life of the French aristocracy of the day as a feint to what's really going on, namely the protagonist's deepening obsession with the notion of "involuntary memory", which first happens upon him one day as he eats a madeleine and is sipping tea. For fun, follow this link to read the moment:

http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/p109g/proust.html

In short, the idea is that our minds sometimes store certain memories as mental "time capsules", usually due to a trauma or complexity of a moment in our lives that our mind automatically recognizes that we cannot deal with. So the issue is shrink wrapped in a trigger of some sort (a song, or the taste of something we are eating) to be dealt with at some later time in our lives.

My moment came via that song. I am so geeked up about this I cannot tell you! But to be teleported to a place and time within myself, to a younger me that is still alive somehow, so deeply and so vividly? It was equal parts wonderful and terrifying. I can totally see why someone would dedicate their lives to trying to study this phenomenon, or trigger it, or experience it. In that moment within myself, wrapped up in that song, was a message from my younger self to my older self about myself.

Now comes the hard part: it was a unique moment, but what did it mean? It was a shiny marble "thought-thing". And to be truly appreciated, like any good marble, it needs to be held, not just seen.