A la recherche du temp perdu

The title of Marcel Proust's great work is often translated into English as "Remembrance of Things Past", although more literally it is "in search of lost time". I confess that I haven't read it, but in one of the best-known scenes, the narrator tastes again a madeleine cake dipped in tea, and it awakens a vivid memory of part of his childhood that he'd forgotten.

Passing the anniversary of Jen's death, I find that those small moments of recollection are slowly becoming less frequent, as new associations overwritten the old. Yet I still hope to stumble across that forgotten key to the past, to the time that's lost.

I was also struck by the finale of the most recent series of Dr Who, in which Amy Pond's memories, triggered by an engagement ring, or a book, or a saying, are instrumental in recreating someone who has been entirely destroyed. The poignancy of the key scene comes partly because we want to be able recover the past, and yet know that we cannot. Indeed, the truth is nearly the opposite. Memory is the texture of loss. Even physical reminders -- Jen's wedding ring, her cross, a jumper that she wore -- conjure up absence as much as presence.

Even facts about the past are hard to reconstruct. I'd forgotten the date that Jen and I became engaged, and no-one else seemed to know either. Eventually, by recovering email from 1992, I found a message to a friend communicating the news, and by cross-referencing that with Jen's mother's recollections, I worked it out.

I'm reminded of lines from Auden's poem "In Memory of W. B. Yeats":

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

Memories of Jen are scattered amongst those of who knew her, echoed in letters and glimpsed in photos. In the same way she has taken with her an irrecoverable fragment of our history - in my case, a very sizeable piece, the memories that connect to and correct and complement my own of our fifteen years together.

One odd reflection I find hopeful. Although we appear to have solid physical continuity in our bodies, the reality is that the atoms of which we are made are being replaced over time (as can be demonstrated by ingestion of labelled substances). It's often said (I don't know how precisely) that over about ten years every atom of your body has been replaced, so that your body has no physical continuity with the distant past. Your essence is in fact the form, the shape, the arrangement - almost as it were the software that runs on the hardware of your atoms. A waterfall retains its shape even though the actual water molecules are constantly moving.

At first this seems a counsel of despair. We can't record the configuration of the trillions of atoms in our body, let alone reproduce it again. Yet my belief is that anything that is remembered by the ultimate creator is not lost - it can be recreated. So Jen's existence is not over, and fading memories of the past are not all that is left.