Tweet With his In Search of Lost Time (formerly Remembrance of Things Past) as one of the few 20th Century works of literary genius, Marcel Proust found memories in the taste of a petite madeleine. They were some of the most unique things about himself. A recluse, he did not go on expedition to the arctic nor did he venture far from his cork-lined room in Paris, but his life was an interior adventure in which he sought to unravel the mysteries of time. With involuntary memory he looked for the permanent and significant amidst the transitory and trivial. Quite simply, he created great art from trivia. In each of us, the trivia is the most important thing about us--"impressions clustered in small knots," Proust said. This trivia he called "inner time" and it is the past that "still lives in us." It is "what we are and is remaking us every moment." An hour is a vase, "filled with perfumes, sounds, places, climates."From a trivial marshmallow, in 1972 Walter Mischel worked an experiment that helped predict the personality and future of children as well as give us insight into the nature of what is popularly called free will.
