…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.*

 

*cited:

In Search of Lost Time

Vol I

Swann’s Way

pp 59-60

Marcel Proust

Trans: C.K. Scott Moncrieff