A preview of things to come:

Somebody mentioned the memories of a lakehouse that a smell can evoke in class on Friday, and Sexson promised us that a discussion on the links between the olfactory sense and our memory is yet to come. He then referred to Marcel Proust's "Rememberance of Things Past" (also translated as "In Search of Lost Time")and the madeline scene. It seems no discussion on memory could miss this scene in Proust's book, in which the narrarator tries to recreate memories of his childhood via the smell of the mini sponge cakes (depicted above, called "petite madelines") and the routine of dunking them in a cup of tea, a routine established in his childhood. The book I borrowed from Dr Sexson now, called "Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: how memory shpaes our past" references the scene in the chapter on Smell and Memory. And Sexson has referred to it in courses I've had with him before....

I'd like to exercise my own visual memory, as I look at these cakes and recall a scene from 2 years ago, when I was enrolled in Micheal Sexson's "Foundations of Classical Literature course". We were talking about Mnesoyme, the muse of memory, which led to a discussion of classic lit and the power of memory, and I was assigned, with a $20 bill that Sexson gave me, to go out in search of this cookie, "the petite madeline", with no prior knowledge as to the significance of the treat or even what it looked like. Since he directed me to Safeway, I went there first, where I quickly discovered, this is an expensive cookie! They had it on a display of wedding desserts, and there weren't many. i asked the lady if she had more, but all they had was what was on display, so i bought them out, and returned to class, my mission complete, with a bag of packaged petite madelines. WEll, we went to commence the experiment, each student with his or her cookie to unwrap. And as we took the first step in opening them, there was a unified expression of disgust: what we could not see from the outside of the package, was that these madelines were OLD and thus, GREEN. We checked the expiration dates (something I didn't think to do in the store, usually packaged cookies off the shelf aren't in danger of growing mold!) and sure enough, they were a month or two past the expiration date. So our experiment stopped there, and while we weren't able to exercise our memories via the madeline that particular class period, from now on I will always associate any image or mention of that cookie with my mission in classical literature two years ago. The memory lives on.