Within five minutes of leaving the reunion, I’d undone the double wrapping and eaten all six rugelach, each a snail of sugar-dusted pastry dough, the cinnamon-lined chambers microscopically studded with midget raisins and chopped walnuts. By rapidly devouring mouthful after mouthful of these crumbs whose floury richness – blended of butter and sour cream and vanilla and cream cheese and egg yolk and sugar – I’d loved since childhood, perhaps I’d find vanishing from Nathan what, according to Proust, vanished from Marcel the instant he recognized “the savour of the little madeleine”: the apprehensiveness of death. “A mere taste,” Proust writes, and “the word ‘death’ … [has] … no meaning for him.” So, greedily I ate, gluttonously, refusing to curtail for a moment this wolfish intake of saturated fat, but, in the end, having nothing like Marcel’s luck.

Within five minutes of leaving the reunion, I’d undone the double wrapping and eaten all six rugelach, each a snail of sugar-dusted pastry dough, the cinnamon-lined chambers microscopically studded with midget raisins and chopped walnuts. By rapidly devouring mouthful after mouthful of these crumbs whose floury richness – blended of butter and sour cream and vanilla and cream cheese and egg yolk and sugar – I’d loved since childhood, perhaps I’d find vanishing from Nathan what, according to Proust, vanished from Marcel the instant he recognized “the savour of the little madeleine”: the apprehensiveness of death. “A mere taste,” Proust writes, and “the word ‘death’ … [has] … no meaning for him.” So, greedily I ate, gluttonously, refusing to curtail for a moment this wolfish intake of saturated fat, but, in the end, having nothing like Marcel’s luck.

– Philip Roth –

American Pastoral

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