English

“And suddenly the memory appeared to me.
That taste was the taste of the little piece of madeleine which, on Sunday mornings at Combray (…) my aunt Léonie would offer me after dipping it in her infusion of tea or lime-blossom.
(…) When from an ancient past nothing subsists, after the death of beings, after the destruction of things, only, more fragile yet more alive, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste remain for a long time still, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, upon the ruins of everything else, bearing without yielding, upon their almost impalpable droplet, the immense structure of memory.”

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (Du côté de chez Swann, 1913)

The French verb « emporter » (“to carry away,” “to take away,” “to carry off”) does not appear here explicitly, yet the entire passage unfolds its deep dynamic. Taste seizes the narrator and carries him away from the present. He is torn from the room where he stands; he is conveyed elsewhere, toward Combray. This displacement is not spatial in a material sense, yet it produces a true departure from the immediate place.

Memory, borne by flavor, carries the subject away from his present time. Something yields—the boundary between present and past—and something resists—the tenuous persistence of the scent. This Proustian “being carried away” has nothing violent in appearance; it acts like a gentle yet irresistible force that withdraws the subject from the instant and leaves him momentarily absent from himself.

Here, what is carried away is not a body, but a consciousness. The French word « emporter » thus finds an almost invisible realization: a displacement without rupture, a silent extraction, an inner elsewhere.