My body felt electric as the image emerged on my screen in waves of completing pixels. I could almost smell developer fluid, as though I were back in my high school darkroom watching a photograph materialize in its chemical bath.
There it was: Marcel Proust’s famous madeleine scene, rendered by artificial intelligence and prompted by me.
The image was imperfect, but the possibilities it suggested were not. A century-old meditation on memory had been reconstructed through one of the newest technologies in human history. Somewhere between Proust and AI, recollection and generation, physical experience and digital simulation, this project began.
In Search of Lost Time takes its name from Proust’s novel of the same name, a work deeply concerned with memory, attention, habit, and the ways experience can disappear and return to us.
I came to Proust almost accidentally while completing my MFA in prose and poetry. I needed a literature course and enrolled knowing little beyond the madeleine and the daunting length of the novel. I had no idea his work would change how I thought about time or what it means to fully inhabit a life.
Proust understood that a taste, scent, sound, or physical sensation can return us to a moment we believed had disappeared. The experience remains sealed within us until something in the present breaks it open.
But I began wondering about other kinds of lost time.
There is buried memory, waiting to be recovered. There is the unattended moment, the conversation we appear to participate in while our thoughts are somewhere else. Then there is the ceded hour, surrendered to a feed and barely remembered afterward.
Buried memory. Unattended moment. Ceded hour. Perhaps they are the same forgetting, caught at different depths.
The last kind troubles me most. A buried memory may someday return. But what happens when an experience was never fully inhabited in the first place? You cannot recover a moment you were not present enough to form.
That question sits at the center of this blog.
In Search of Lost Time is an independent blog and publication about attention: what captures it, what erodes it, and what becomes possible when we reclaim it.
I write about memory, technology, identity, creativity, work, and the physical experience of being alive. The essays often begin in ordinary places: a museum gallery, a hotel bar, a Manhattan street, a corporate office. I follow the larger questions hiding inside the moment.
How do we live fully in a world designed to keep us distracted? How do we use powerful new technologies without weakening our capacities for attention, imagination, judgment, and wonder?
Our devices allow us to document nearly everything while sometimes separating us from the experience itself. A photograph may preserve the appearance of a sunset, but not the smell of food smoke, the condensation on a glass, or the unexpected conversation that gave the evening meaning. Technology can give us the texture of a life without asking us to live it.
Artificial intelligence sharpens the question. It can produce images, language, music, and ideas with astonishing speed. But it cannot provide the lived context that gives those things meaning. It has no body moving through the world. No private history awakened by a smell. No awareness that its time will eventually run out.
I have spent much of my professional life working in software, automation, product strategy, marketing, and AI. I am also a literary writer trained in the slower discipline of noticing. I do not experience those parts of my life as a contradiction. Their intersection is the vantage point from which this publication is written.
I am not interested in rejecting technology or romanticizing a world before it. I want to understand how we can use extraordinary new tools without allowing attention, discernment, and imagination to become unused muscles.
This is not a blog about having the answers. It is an attempt to pay closer attention. To notice what is happening before it disappears. To recover what has been misplaced. To remain awake to a life while we are still living it.