#5 Little Things: Proust’s madeleine

"Buy Local, Buy Fresh" oil on canvas by Susan Powell

~ by Craig Bennett

It’s interesting how some little thing, quite ordinary and unspectacular, can inspire a sudden, unexpected wave of delighted appreciation, enthusiasm, and/or memory. The most famous example of this with which I’m familiar is Marcel Proust’s madeleine. At the beginning of his lengthy, three-volume Remembrance of Things Past, he describes biting into this familiar French pastry and suddenly being visited by a flood of memories, all of them associated however tenuously with the madeleine. And I couldn’t help thinking of this when I had my first bite of a croissant at a local establishment that has them available, freshly baked, each morning. Although hardly an exact equivalent, it was the closest thing I’ve had in this country to the croissants I’ve enjoyed in Europe. The crust was thin and flaky, I could taste the butter in the dough, and the inside was nearly hollow. I was delightfully surprised. But more importantly for this writing, it brought forth a flood of memory just as Proust’s madeleine had in his very long, memoir-like magnum opus.

I don’t recall the circumstances under which I had my first croissant in Europe. It was a very long time ago. However, I’ve returned to Europe a number of times since, and each trip offered an abundance of serendipitous moments as I discovered all kinds of little things that I found delightful and amusing.

There was, of course, the croissant, which was only the first of many memorable gastronomical experiences. There was the wood-fire, hearth-baked pizza in a little, unimpressive-looking open-sided place just outside of Nice: I’ve never had a pizza before or since that was so indescribably delicious. But dining in Europe—especially France—was a consistently marvelous experience regardless of where we happened to stop for our next meal. And on a continent where so much care and attention are paid to all aspects of both cooking and dining, I wouldn’t have expected to find even a European equivalent of something like McDonald’s; but the long arm and grasping fingers of American commerce are far reaching. Along a picturesque, traffic-free street in Salzburg, there they were: the ubiquitous golden arches. But with an important difference.

The street was lined with shops and restaurants of various kinds, but without the sort of signage we’re accustomed to seeing in the United States. Instead, honoring the antiquity of the town, its streets, and their long history, every business establishment on either side had a curved, wrought iron arm extending from its façade with a symbol dangling from its outer end that would have revealed the business of the establishment to an illiterate population. And at the end of one of those curved, wrought iron arms hung a wrought iron circle containing the unmistakable symbol of a McDonald’s fast-food restaurant.

But most of my trips to Europe were taken up with hiking in the mountains—the Alps of Switzerland and Austria and once in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania’s Transylvania region. Here, too, I encountered many pleasant little surprises that made me smile and reach for my camera. In Switzerland, passing through a tiny Alpine village, I photographed an old retired hiking boot, hanging from the upright divider between two front windows, that served as a planter. A bunch of bright yellow flowers were sticking out of its top. Farther along I took another shot of a pump and trough that had been made from the trunk of a large tree. The trough looked much like a dugout canoe with an upright pump or spring outlet at one end, also apparently fashioned from part of the same tree. A metal spout, however, emerged from the pump a couple of feet above the trough, and from it hung a small bucket full of brightly colored flowers. I just took a quick picture and moved on. And in Austria, where at that time many houses in the mountains were still heated primarily by wood fires, those houses had large amounts of firewood stacked neatly not far from the main door, often under the protection of a roofed alcove. However, one that I passed had its stack of firewood arranged around a small niche; and in that niche was a pot of colorful flowers. It was a totally gratuitous arrangement that offered no tangible benefit to its creator. But it was a simple, highly personal, and unpretentious expression of the householder’s creative urge to produce a little art for his own gratification. And I found the mountains of Europe to be full of that sort of thing.

But some of the things I found so delightful when I came upon them unexpectedly were not the artistic expressions of human beings. Instead, they had been created by nature. And the most memorable of those was the valley of Lauterbrunnen and the village that can be found there. As I described it in Nights on the Mountain,

“Then they rounded a bend at the foot of the mountain, and he was suddenly stopped in his tracks. Before him lay a broad, flat valley walled on either side by sheer granite cliffs, absolutely vertical (or so he remembered them) and a few hundred feet high. Above, their edges were fringed with thickly growing evergreens of almost uniform height. And here and there, as he gazed down the visible extent of the valley, a sparkling, ribbon-like waterfall made its way as if in slow motion down a smooth wall of gray rock overlooking the valley floor. At its foot, the impact of the falling water created a small cloud of spray; and in the midst of each cloud of spray was a rainbow.”

It was the most beautiful place I’ve ever been.

Perhaps these observations and experiences made such an impression on me because I was in a foreign country, far from the familiarities of home, and was therefore sort of hyper alert to anything even slightly unusual. But that is the key, I believe, to all such observations and experiences that could qualify as little things: they have to be noticed. And if your mind, your thoughts, and your attention are occupied with something other than what’s right in front of you, you’ll simply miss them.

-Craig H. Bennett, author of Nights on the Mountain and More Things in Heaven and Earth, available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble .com, and most book stores

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