The secret sense of time

How to be in time across time (also thanks to Proust)

Andrey Tarkovsky; still image from his movie ‘Mirror’

The clock is the key machine of the modern industrial age, ruling over our daily lives’ most precious resource: life time. Time is always ticking, terminator-style, ruthlessly counting us all the way down to our eventual demise. Once in a while though, we sense this dimension of time that is different from the one we read on clocks. Like a secret pulse, this kind of time persists, dormant somewhere inside us. Then – a certain taste, surprising scent or special light at dusk can do this – linear time duration collapses, and we are back! In the past! Like folded pages pressed together, the past gets reopened inside of us, ready to be felt again.

In the seven volumes of his vast oeuvre “In Search of Lost Time”, French novelist Marcel Proust was very much after this secret sense of time. He explored the continuity of life that hides beneath the surface of linear time and memory and described his (or his protagonists’) once-lived-moments in brilliant eloquence and sensory richness. Proust believed there was a hidden dimension of lived and felt time that lay dormant inside of us until it was re-awakened by sensory triggers. Proust called this “time regained” (temps retrouvé), a time that is felt and escapes the chronologically measured time of clocks. He believed in a non-continuous self, meaning that a constellation of different selves persist across time, preserved in the layers of our lived experience and our individual sensory-emotional imprints. Time reshapes who we become, but a trigger can suddenly summon an earlier version of self.¹

For the common reader, like me, “the Madeleine moment” may be the most famous literary example of Proust’s concept of time. His narrator Marcel is a somewhat disillusioned but highly perceptive adult man caught in the routines of clock time and the conventions of his sociocultural environment. One day, when he dips a Madeleine, a French type of buttery cake, into his linden tea and tastes it, he is suddenly and involuntarily also the small boy again who spends his childhood holidays and summers at his great-aunt’s house in the village of Combray. The abbreviated version of this scene is this:

“And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday morning at Combray… my aunt Léonie used to give me… Immediately the grey house… rose up like a stage to attach itself to the little pavilion opening to the garden.”

To me, reading Proust can feel like an exquisite guided meditation on attention, memory and time, allowing me to inhabit his world of heightened perception. His writing is so precise in its phenomenology that it might even ignite sparks in our own buried memory archive. That’s at least what happened to me. Inspired by Proust, I created my own Madeleine moment – hoping he wouldn’t mind.

In the following, I experimented with using parts of Proust’s original text passages around the Madeleine scene² – these parts are shown in italics – and mixing them with my own words around some childhood memories from when I was five and six years old; these portions are shown in regular type. At that time, I lived with my parents and sisters in a small German village called Mühleip, where I could just walk to school and otherwise roam around on roller skates or my little bike.

Here’s my “literary remix”:

For many years, already, everything about Mühleip that was not our small neighborhood, the bakery near my school selling sour candy or my little yellow bike, had ceased to exist for me, when one day fast forward in the winter of 2024 – I now lived in faraway Minnesota – a friend, enjoying an evening in my outdoor sauna with me, suggested that, contrary to my habit, I have a little cannabis. I refused at first and then, I do not know why, changed my mind… Just a few minutes later, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening inside me. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any notion as to its cause. It had immediately rendered the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way that love acts, by filling me with a precious essence: or rather this essence was not merely inside me, it was me. I had ceased to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Where could it have come to me from–this powerful and sweet nostalgia come from? I sensed that it was connected to the effect of this medicine, plus the deliciously familiar and smoky smell of the birch wood burning in the black sauna stove nearby…

Clearly, the truth I am seeking is not in the cannabis, but in me… and I turn to my mind. It is up to my mind to find the truth… and suddenly the memory appeared.

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I move further through this Proustian creative portal and continue my time travel:

The heat and incense of the wood that touch my nose and skin bring back distinct memories from these childhood days in Mühleip, maybe because my family, first led by my grandfather and then two of his sons, ran a sauna fabrication business nearby. Time transcends, stretching beyond its ordinary nature. I see young versions – much like visions – of various people who had been important to me inside the microcosm of our lives back then. I first smile and then start to cry, for so many of them have already passed, some of them quite tragically. What does it signify? How am I to grasp it?

My childhood home erupts from the fog of my forgetting. There it is, sitting quite gloriously alongside our small graveled road called “To the Tiny Castle” (Zum Schlößchen). The sand-grey house with its unassuming but curious windows opens to the green grass of an expansive yard, in spitting distance from the church on the hill. All the village’s roads, at least in my newly accessed young child’s mind, lead to my school. I can smell the freshness and warmth of our summers and see the fiery red of the wild poppies in the fields nearby.

The visual and olfactory clues of this moment bring back another specific memory: we also had a sauna way back then, and I am now laying on my back on the floor when I am five. I suddenly sense the energy and the life glowing around the heads of both my mother and father in the sauna next to me. I can feel the cooler air pooling in the space where I lay, near my parents and the sauna’s radiating electric stove. It all suddenly feels cohesive and continuous. Can I do magic?

I switch scenes and am now outside, in front of that house. It’s the height of summer. I can feel my naked little feet as I try not to sink into the sharp gravel stones of our rural road. I kneel down and see the dark stones’ mysterious shimmer in the golden sun. At once I’m back in the day when I had fallen off my bike on that same gravel – now I can even feel a bit of that familiar childhood embarrassment again – right in front of our village priest. The church is nearby, and he was out on a walk, and from where I’m lying I can see his enormous black shoes appearing from beneath his swaying Sunday robe. My little yellow bike – oh, how much affection I had for it then. On my sauna bench, I sit still for another moment. I now remember how my bike had an orange siren mounted on its tiny handlebar. I can see it clearly, with its black lever, can even faintly hear the three sounds it could make, so useful for a kid roaming outdoors. My father had brought it back from one of his business travels, as a special gift just for me. From faraway America, with its shiny and mysterious intrigue.

And just like that, for a few suspended moments in time, I find myself in love and awe with my senses and the memories they summon. This is my secret sense of time. It guides me back to fragments of my life’s stunning and tender beauty, melancholy, and drama. A living connection between two points in time, rising from what feels like an internal ocean of timelessness.

A very awkward photo from around this time. Yet it has become precious to me because our former neighbors (“the Müllers”) appeared here as my “onlookers,” and they have sadly already passed.

I once read that many of us internally feel no older than around our mid-thirties. We age outwardly of course, inevitably, but our earlier selves do not just vanish. Among the textures of our sensations and memories, we carry a kind of personal continuity, something that radiates from the past into the present. This also reminds me of what Substack writer Deborah Shapiro described as “being-in-time-over-the-course-of-time.”

The memories that surfaced in the hot sauna on that wintry night two years ago may seem small, considering I was back in my world of impressions from when I was five. Yet somewhere in me, even back then, wasn’t there already a kind of timeless awareness – true to self – that these moments somehow mattered and were worth keeping? Because after all, they were immense.

This essay took a few approaches and iterations, and I am thankful for the support of a number of people who helped along the way: Shane Plumer, Esq. Rachel Parker Michelle Varghese Rick Lewis, and the whole Write Hearted community. And, lastly Jeannine Ouellette who might be glad that I (finally) arrived at a published version of the original writing idea that I brought to her doorstep.

1. Proust was a fan of the philosopher Henri Bergson, a contemporary of his, who wrote about what he called “temps réel” (real or lived time), a continuous flow of experience distinct from clock time. Proust tried to create the embodied and literary version of this idea.

2. Marcel Proust. Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1. Translated by Lydia Davis. New York: Penguin Classics, 2004, p. 45, 47)