Sensory experiences stay with us, in memory and matter, for indeterminate periods of time. What might otherwise be considered as a mundane sight, commonplace object, or expected experience—belonging to childhood, quotidian rite or one’s sentimental education—somehow lingers in our consciousness only to slowly, eventually, alter the way in which we perceive the world. Such things, like bites of the Proustian madeleine, first loves, and frights, certain stories, and visions, i.e., stuff caught in the net, often in the periphery of immediate experience, gradually come to reveal a location at the more unlocatable ends of the mind—not only as memories or recurring thoughts, nor as mere impressions, resurfacing with indifference in the line of thought, but in more transformative experience of the interruptive return: past sights irrupting in mind as insight.
- Sabrina Tarasoff