Blog8: Sound Scenarios
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time.There is a famous paragraph which describes when he tasted the Madeleines dessert again and memorized life in Combray. Select a part here (the whole paragraph[1]):
…perhaps because of Combray’s memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered… But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
I think sound is also like the description of taste and smell here. It is fragmented, hard to catch, not concrete like visuals. But it has the power to rebuild or trigger to rebuild our memories. Sounds may be just like the mark on the wall from Woolf, inspiring an involuntary stream of consciousness, being decomposed, imagined or mixed into other scenarios, which may not only be memories, but also be some special experience. Those voices that awaken the depths of our hearts and give us an epiphany may not only be memories of the dusty past, but also new realizations of the present or the future. As Proust recalls, it is not only a search for the past, but also arouses a reflection for life and the future.
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