Inherited Memories

I was looking up two words that define the feeling that permeates the first book of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past, as it is also known): Nostalgia, as defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “is pleasure and sadness that is caused by remembering something from the past and wishing that you could experience it again”. And the other word is Saudade, a word of Portuguese origin which Wikipedia defines as “a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never return”. Given that both words refer to places or situations that one has known, I have always wondered why my greatest nostalgia or saudade – possibly the only one – has to do with a place where I have never been.

The sensation I feel when I look at pictures or paintings of the English countryside can only be described by the previous definitions. And I have never lived in or enjoyed a place like that during my lifetime. My great-grandmother, however, was English and she came from a small town in the eastern part of England. I imagine she must have had plenty of contact with the countryside and she must have loved it.

She later got married and moved to Sweden with her husband. Was her nostalgia for her home so strong that it was somehow imprinted into her genes and then, trickling down through generations, passed on to me? There are so many characteristics that we inherit through our DNA, so why not our memories and sensations? I carry her name and was born on her birthday, and the only thing that would explain this feeling of nostalgia and saudade is that I inherited her memories due to the inexplicable workings of the universe.

I’ll just have to ask her when we meet again… and once I’m there, I will also compare notes with a very dear friend of mine with whom I had so many conversations on the matter of inherited memories. We’ll see if I was right…