“The taste of childhood is something that forever sunk into the soul”

Recently I had a nostalgic conversation with friends about the tastes of childhood. Literally. Everyone remembered their favorite childhood food. I talked about sweet kefir with a crispy «French» cheese bun, condensed coffee from a can, mom’s cinnamon shortcakes. Someone — about their attachments. Then I thought: after all, the taste of childhood is not just Proustian madeleines. Not just a memory of old scenery or this or that landscape outside the window. “This is the joy of a state that is your free state, but it arose from your own life,” philosopher Merab Mamardashvili said about this in his lectures on Proust¹.

• Children, live with taste!

This means that the truth appears when our life, really tested by us, as it were, emerges in us purified and clear. She is completely ours. The taste of childhood is what we have been taught: to the pleasure of reading or to the salty taste of blood during a yard fight, to the feeling of the breadth or wretchedness of the space in which we lived, to the joyful laughter of a younger sister or the drunken abuse of parents.

Each of us has our own taste of childhood. Life will still offer many different tastes, they can be changed, but the original one cannot be eradicated. Even if we don’t remember anything from childhood – no toys, no birthdays, no gifts, absolutely nothing – he is there, the program cannot be changed, he is with us forever. As Marcel Proust himself wrote about this: “When nothing is left of the distant past, after the death of living beings, after the destruction of things, only, more fragile, but more tenacious, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smells and tastes for a long time they still continue, like souls, to remind themselves of themselves, to expect, to hope, they continue, among the ruins of everything else, to carry, not exhausted under its weight, on their barely perceptible drop, a huge building of memory.

• Should I trust childhood memories?

It is the taste of childhood that often determines our worldview, is the breeding ground for our political preferences. The taste of childhood largely determines the future style of life. Therefore, when they say the phrase “We all come from childhood”, worn out to holes, it means not just that we all had it, and not only that we all continue to be children along with other acquired incarnations (“adult” , «parent» …). And the fact that it is there, in childhood — who had what it was — is formed, if you like, our individual mentality, the internal tuning fork is tuned. That is, how we think, what the soul responds to, and what disgusts it. What resonates and what dissonances, caresses the ear or cuts. Our morals are formed, the main reactions are programmed.

Mentality is our personal mindset, a special vision of the world. Can it change significantly? More like an exception. Since it represents the “reverse side” of human consciousness, which is largely hidden from a person and is not reflected by him. And in this sense, tastes really do not argue.

¹ mamardashvili.com