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  3. In the old days, it was all done with cakes. For Marcel Proust, it was a visit to Mother’s for tea and madeleines that provided

In the old days, it was all done with cakes. For Marcel Proust, it was a visit to Mother’s for tea and madeleines that provided

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问题 In the old days, it was all done with cakes. For Marcel Proust, it was a visit to Mother’s for tea and madeleines that provided the access to "the vast structure of recollection"  that was  to  become  his  masterpiece  on  memory  and  nostalgia, "Remembrance of Past Things." These days, it’s not necessary to evoke the past: you can’t move without tripping over it.
   In an age zooming forward technologically, why all the backward glances? The Oxford English Dictionary’s first definition of nostalgia reads: "acute longing for familiar surroundings; severe homesickness." With the speed of computers doubling every 18 months, and the net doubling in size in about half that, no wonder we’re aching for familiar surroundings. Since the cornerstone of the Information Age is change, anything enduring becomes precious.  " People are looking for something authentic,"  says McLaren. Trouble is, nostalgia has succumbed to trends in marketing, demographics and technology."Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be," says Michael J.  Wolf, senior partner at Booz-Allen & Hamilton in New York."These are the new good old days."
   Baby boomers form the core of the nostalgia market.  The boomers, defined by American demographers as those born between 1946 and 1964, are living long and prosperous lives. In both Europe and America, they remain the Holy Grail for admen, and their past has become everyone’s present. In a study on "entertainment imprinting," two American marketing professors, Robert Schindler and Morris Holbrook, asked people ranging in age from 16 to 86 which popular music from the past they liked best. People’s favorite songs, they found, tended to be those that were popular when they were about 24, with their affection for pop songs diminishing on either side of that age. Doubtless Microsoft knows about entertainment imprinting, or at least nostalgia. The company hawks its latest Explorer to the strains of Simon and Garfunkel’s "Homeward Bound," just as it launched Windows 98 to the tune of "Start Me up" by the Rolling Stones. Boomers remember both tunes from their 20s.
   If boomers are one market that values memories, exiles are another. According to the International Organization of Migration, more than 150 million people live today in a country other than the one where they were born—double the number that did so in 1965. This mass movement has sources as dire as tyranny and as luxurious as the freedoms of an EU passport.  But exiles and refugees share one thing: homes left behind. Type in "nostalgia" on the search engine Google, and one of the first sites that pop up is the nostalgia page of The Iranian, an online site for Iran’s exiles, most of whom fled after 1978’s Islamic revolution. Perhaps the savviest exploitation of nostalgia has been the secondhand-book site alibris, corn, which features stories of clients’ rediscovering long-lost books on it.  One John Mason Mings writes of the glories of finding a book with information on "Kickapoo Joy Juice," ad dreaded medicine of his youth. A Pennsylvanian waxes over alibris’s recovery of his first-grade primer "Down cherry Street." The Net doesn’t merely facilitate nostalgia—it promotes it. Web-based auction houses have helped jump-start markets for vintage items, form marbles to Apple Macintoshes.
   Cutting-edge technology,  designed to be transient, has even bred its own instanostalgia. Last year a $666 Apple I went for $18,000 to a British collector at a San Francisco auction.  "Historic! Microsoft Multiplan for Macintosh" crows one item on eBay’s vintage Apple section. Surf to The Net Nostalgia Quiz to puzzle over questions like "In the old days, Altavista used to have which one of these URLs?"
   Those who don’t remember their history are condemned to repeat it.  Or so entertainment moguls hope, as they market ’70s TV hits like "Charlie’s Angels" and "Scooby Doo," to a generation that can’t remember them the first time round. If you’ve missed a Puff Daddy track or a "Sopranos" episode, panic not. The megahits of today are destined to be the golden oldies of 2020, says Christopher Nurko of the branding consultant FutureBrand.  "I guarantee you, Madonna’s music will be used to sell everything," he says."God help me, I hope it’s not selling insurance." It could be. When we traffic in the past, nothing’s sacred.
Explain the beginning sentence "In the old days, it was all done with cakes."
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答案It means the recollection of the past often starts from tea or cakes. Such habit is always with us that it provides an access to "the vast structure of recollection"—the familiar usual surroundings and severe homesickness
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