018: What the body remembers

Embodied inheritance, and the memory of the everyday

When from a long-distant past nothing subsists... taste and smell alone remain, poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us.”
— Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

In Swann’s Way, memory does not arrive through effort. It appears, unexpectedly, in a cup of tea and a madeleine. A small, ordinary gesture, a crumb touching the tongue—awakens an entire world of buried time. That moment, quiet and nearly forgettable, becomes the portal to everything else.

We remember more than we realize. But it is not always the mind that remembers. The body remembers too.

It remembers in ways that unfold slowly: through the scent of wood smoke, the slowness of a walk, the weight of a blanket just before sleep. And in these remembered rhythms, something essential returns. Not information. Not insight, exactly. But presence.

“He realized that the body is not a servant of the mind, but its witness.”
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

There are quiet moments recalled not in words, but in muscle. The grip of a stair railing worn smooth by decades of descent. The temperature of sun-warmed pavement beneath bare feet. The hum of a fan as summer sleep begins to take hold. These are not stories we tell. They are something smaller, more precise. The body’s own language, spoken without instruction.

Some memories follow a timeline. The body moves differently. It remembers through sensation, through posture. Through the way breath shortens when entering a hospital. Or slows in a childhood kitchen. In the presence of familiarity, something interior aligns…not because we recall, but because we return.

This is not a study of nostalgia. It is an inquiry into embodied knowing. The kind of memory that cannot be digitized, edited, or pinned to a date. The kind that lives inside us, slowly accumulating into the invisible grammar of how we move through the world.