a madeleine moment

She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called "petite madeleines"... No sooner had the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me... And suddenly the memory revealed itself.

When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

- Marcel Proust