Enchanted Time

A hymn for a childhood book

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This week, in support of the Enchanted-by-the-Book contest, I offer a second reflection on a book that once enchanted me. Here is the first, a parental comedy.

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Enchanted Time

I lifted Carol out of the box with more reverence than I had given the others.

My faulty memory recognized but obscured the details of Scuffy the Tugboat, Little Cottontail, Three Little Kittens, and the rest. A long tunnel of experience stretched between those books and me.

Not so with Carol. I met the gaze of her large eyes looking out from under straight, home-cut bangs and a half-century’s dust. Between us lay only a sheet of paper. I could easily cross it to the side of my first crush, big sister, and long-lost twin.

Time rippled like rising heat and compressed to the size of a curio.

I was four years old when I met her, practically five. If my birthday had been a shoelace, I’d have tripped over it.

Carol had a job. Carol’s job was to go to kindergarten. As the protagonist of a 24-page Little Golden Book called We Like Kindergarten (1965), by Clara Cassidy, illustrated by Eloise Wilkin, she showed preschoolers like me what to expect of The Big Show, elementary school. I learned from her that school was a utopia of color, creativity, class pets, and dancing friends. School had blue finger paint, blue easels, and kind teachers who managed lessons from a piano bench. Every child in school had a sleeping mat in a gorgeous, vivid color.

Carol knew what we younger ones would need to know.

“At kindergarten,” she said precisely, “I hang up my spotted coat.”

I had a spotted coat. I had straight, home-cut bangs and large, serious eyes. I cared about beautiful and precise sentences. I would follow Carol anywhere.

Three books for the cat and one for me.

In a famous passage by Marcel Proust, a man wipes up the last crumbs of a madeleine cookie dipped in tea, and the taste jolts him back to a childhood memory—sharing the same cookie with his aunt on Sunday mornings before Mass.

Scientists therefore call it The Proust Effect when a taste or smell puts an otherwise sensible person in a time-crunching swoon, like one of Madeline L’Engle’s tesseracts, but personalized by someone’s unique sensory memories.

According to both Proust and the science-people, the sense of sight is less likely to produce these powerful effects. Journal articles explain why the neurological receptors for taste and smell have a special relationship to memory. As one recent team of authors explains, scents and tastes “powerfully cue autobiographical memories, in many respects more powerfully than visual or other sensory modalities” (Green, et al, 2023).¹ In Proust’s simpler explanation, the “sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it.” According to both science and literature, the sight of a children’s book should not put me in a time warp of dizzying sensation, reliving the anticipatory excitement of a four-year-old who couldn’t wait to feed the class turtle.

But it did.

Sitting at my dining table in 2023, I had the feeling that my hands were about to be covered in blue paint, and the blank paper waited for the imprint of my hands.

From visual cues, We Like Kindergarten set my neurons flaring like a pyrotechnic show on Independence Day.

The science of sense and memory does not seem to account for what happens when we pick up a beloved old book and relive the knowledge, sensation, and identity of the past.

Readers and especially re-readers know about enchanted time. We don’t need MRI scans to explain it.

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Photo and illustration credits

Storage box photo by Lia Trevarthen on Unsplash.

Photos of We Like Kindergarten, by Clara Cassidy, by the author.

Fireworks photo by Arthur Chauvineau on Unsplash

1. Jeffrey D. Green, Chelsea A. Reid, Margaret A. Kneuer, and Mattie V. Hedgebeth (2023). “The proust effect: Scents, food, and nostalgia,” Current Opinion in Psychology, Vol. 50. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X23000076.