When the Colors Fade
Someone said to me once not to read Proust until I was ready. How will I know if I’m ready? This someone, an ex, said I would know once I hit the twilight years of my life, when enough time has passed that the remembering becomes much more freighted with meaning, and mortality tugs more insistently on the consciousness. So, of course, I went out right away and bought the damn thing, the first book in French novelist Marcel Proust’s famous seven-volume novel, In Search of Lost Time.
It’s been a decade and a half since I bought the book, and I still haven’t read it all the way through. But I can tell you all about the madeleine. Deserved or not, it is the most famous description in the novel, some say in all of modern literature. Marcel, the main character, describes in exquisite sensory detail the experience of eating the sweet madeleine with a cup of tea and the effect it has on his memory.
“The smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”
British author Alain de Botton said of Proust and memory in an interview with NPR, “Our minds store information in very bizarre ways. And one of the things that Proust brilliantly brings out is the way that suddenly a bit of our past, a bit of memory, can surge in front of us…bring back to us a period of our lives that we thought was lost forever.”
My father-in-law, Saul, has an exceptional memory. He can recall the minutia of his childhood as if he were seeing the movie version play in his mind. It’s been over 75 years since he played stickball with his neighborhood friends on the side streets of the Bronx, and yet he remembers it like this:
“Home plate, usually at the beginning of a street, in order to have as long a distance as possible to the outfield, was always a sewer cover…Somewhere in the middle of the street there would be another sewer cover that would become second base. Those two covers would then set the boundaries of the field. First and third base would be drawn (usually in chalk but at various times actually painted) on a perpendicular line equidistant between home and second and as close to the sidewalk as possible, leaving room for parked cars. Whereas a baseball diamond has 90 feet between each base, our field was more like 120 feet between each base, but the distance between first and third was no more than 30 feet.”
Saul also has synesthesia, a condition in which two or more senses merge together. For some synesthetes, they see colors when they hear sounds. For others, they have the sensation of tasting words. In my father-in-law’s case, he sees colors when he thinks about numbers and letters. The letter L, which is the first letter of his wife’s name (Linda), is sky blue. J is purple and K is orange-yellow.
I asked Saul when he first realized that his sensory experience of language might be different from other people. “It wasn’t until I got married,” he told me. “I never thought anything about it — it was just like breathing — but then I mentioned the color associations to Linda one day, and she looked at me like I was crazy.”
Just over four percent of the population has some form of synesthesia. The first documented case traces back to the Austrian Georg Tobias Ludwig Sachs, in the late eighteenth century. But it wasn’t until the late 1980s when research in the phenomenon really took off. Today, several universities have established research centers to study it, and celebrities like Billy Eilish and Pharrell Williams have talked openly about their experience with synesthesia.
“Every day of the week has a color, a number, a shape,” Eilish told Jimmy Fallon on his talk show in 2021. “Sometimes, things have a smell that I can think of or a temperature or a texture.”
Along with a rich sensory experience, recent studies have found effects on memory, too. In one study published in the Journal of Neuropsychology in 2020, researchers at the University of Sussex found that “an older person with synesthesia would tend to have about the same memory abilities as a younger person without synesthesia, all else being equal.”
In another study published in Scientific Reports in 2020, researchers at the University of Bern reported a “long-lasting memory benefit,” for grapheme-color synesthetes, the type of synesthesia Saul has, and cited evidence of an enhanced ability to recall autobiographical details, especially childhood memories.
When I mentioned this to Saul, he told me he remembers his early childhood with so much clarity. “On the first day of kindergarten I remember my shoes were untied when it was time to go home and since I didn’t know how to tie my laces — catch this — my classmate Barbara Beck bent down and tied them for me.” On snowy days, she also helped him with his galoshes.
Of the apartment building he grew up in, he recalled: “Each floor had 12 apartments, three elevators, a mail shoot and two stairwells. A garbage depository dumped directly into an incinerator located in the basement. At the front door to the lobby could be found a proud uniformed doorman…The doorman rotation consisted of John, a tall Scotsman who was ever so proper, Charlie, an older good-natured fellow, and everyone’s favorite, Henry.”
Out of curiosity, I checked the floor plans for the building in Columbia University’s digital library collection and confirmed there were 12 apartments on each floor and two stairwells, just as he remembered, but only two elevators, not three (he pointed out, though, that one of the elevators was a service elevator so perhaps it never made it into the floor plan).
But while Saul’s form of synesthesia may give him some buffer against typical age-related memory loss, it hasn’t prevented the synesthesia itself from diminishing with age.
“The colors have faded tremendously,” he told me. “I used to enjoy words so much more. They all have color, but none of them are vivid.” He told me my letter — J — is dull. Like very dull. “Sorry, Jen.”
It’s not just synesthetes who experience a decline in color perception. According to a study published last year in Scientific Reports, we all have some reduced sensitivity to the intensity of color as we age.
I suppose in some ways, though, Saul is fortunate. The colors may have faded, but they have left his memories mostly in tact.
At 84 years old, Saul can recount one memory from his earliest days — as early as one year old — looking up at his mom from a position underneath her breast. “Was she actually breastfeeding you?” I said. He told me he wasn’t sure but that he’s had the image in his mind for as long as he can remember.
“It’s not vivid, but it has left an impression on me, a feeling of being so close to her.” His mother died in 1998.
In 1915, Proust wrote about the loss of his close friend, Bertrand de Fénelon, who died in combat in the First World War. The death left him heartbroken, and yet he reflected: “memory nourishes the heart.”
…like souls, ready to remind us…
And so it must. At least, it’s the way I like to think of my father-in-law, that even as Saul’s body ages, his heart is as expansive as ever with the memories that sustain it.