In less than 5 hours I read the following passages from two different books, both evoking Marcel Proust's seminal writing about memory.

David Carr, "The Night of The Gun":

A dealer who dropped his money on Dom Pérignon at the restaurant palmed me a Balkan Sobranie cigarette tin when he found out it was my birthday. He told me to open it in the bathroom. I saw the powder and knew what to do. It was a Helen Keller hand-under-the-water moment. Lordy, I can finally see! Cold fusion, right here in the bathroom stall; it was the greatest thing ever. My endorphins leaped at this new opportunity, hugging it and feeling all its splendid corners. My, that’s better. You can laugh all you want, but Proust had a similar epiphany eating a madeleine: “…a shudder ran through me, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that had happened to me. An exquisite pleasure invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.” Every addict is formed in the crucible of the memory of that first hit. Even as the available endorphins attenuate, the memory is right there. The chase is on, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days—in my case, for years on end. I could get high just having coke in my pocket, knowing that I had a little edge that few others had.

William Leith, "A Northern Line Minute":

I'm on the train, and the doors are shutting behind me, when I smell the smoke; or rather I'm stepping into the train, towards the seating area, when I sense something bad, and I don't know what it is, and I sit down, and I see that the doors are shutting, and I don't know yet where the bad feeling is coming from, because when you smell something it goes straight to your memory, smell bypasses all analysis, as Proust described when he bit into the dunked cake and was transported to his childhood, and only later realized that this was because of the smell of the cake, the madeleine; I step into the train, and feel the bad feeling, the ominous feeling, that something is very wrong, it's the memory of fires, but not good fires, and I sit down in the seat, and the doors close, and then I realize that I'm smelling something, and it's burning rubber, or plastic, or oil, or a mixture of all three, and I shift upwards in my seat, already knowing it's too late, because the doors are closing; have closed.