13.12.07

Londoniaz 1850m

The French literature features a novelist from whom I feel close to. Not that I have an ounce of his talent (although my French teacher often criticized my prose as "as circumvolutory" as his, and this was obviously no compliment), but because he came up with some concepts which are so true to me. And even proved so earlier today.

In Search of Lost Time.

Marcel Proust is a writer, born in the XIXth century in Paris, who focused his writing on memories and time (again nothing to compare to my article on the same topic though). A psychological attitude is even referenced after his name: the Proust effect or involuntary memory. The later has been materialised in a novel where the hero, walking by a patisserie, was brought back to his childhood memories by the mere smell of a freshly-backed madeleine. We commonly name this phenomenon "Madeleine de Proust" (Proust's Madeleine): the activation of deep-buried feelings or memories by an exogenous event.

As mentioned above, this happened to me this afternoon again. No I have not eaten a madeleine (I am trying to put off weight before the Christmas season really kicks off). But making my way through to the nearest tube station, I came across a street where a short-lasting forest of Christmas trees has arisen. A few seconds at the corner of this street, and I was gone. Back there. In my mountains...

A breeze of fresh air.

For me the smell of the evergreens, of their sap... brings me immediately back to my mountains where as a child I was wandering in the snowed forest, looking for our victim. The tree that will throne in the middle of our chalet with its lot of balls and decorations. But don't get me wrong, I am neither nostalgic, nor home-sick. After all, there are so many things happening in London that evoke my home, that I feel at home here. Food, skiing, deers, now the evergreens... As soon as I will find some Chartreuse in pubs and stop sipping my own reserve, then I think we will be there: London will be on the French map of Alps! Because as they say in the latest (pseudo-trendy, though crappy) advert for the Tourism Board of the French Alps... "J'adore la montagne" (I luv' da mountains):

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