Proust suggests that we have a better chance of generating vivid images of our past when we are involuntarily jogged into remembering it by a madeleine, a long-forgotten smell or an old glove, than when we voluntarily and intellectually attempt to evoke it: Voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect and the eyes, [gives] us only imprecise facsimiles of the past which no more resemble it than pictures by bad painters resemble the spring . . . So we don’t believe that life is beautiful because we don’t recall it, but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated, and
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