Art historians spent decades reading Salvador Dalí’s melting clocks as a meditation on Einstein’s relativity. When the scientist Ilya Prigogine asked him directly, Dalí said he was watching a wheel of Camembert melt in the sun. This episode uses the 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory as a lens on Dalí’s mind, starting with the paranoiac-critical method he developed in 1930 to induce hallucinations while keeping his conscious mind as a detached observer.

We examine the fleshy sleeping creature at the center of the canvas, a self-portrait modeled on a figure from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, and the ant-covered orange pocket watch that traces back to two childhood traumas involving a decomposing lizard and a wounded bat. We also place the Cap de Creus rocks and the shadow of Mount Pani in their Catalan setting, discuss Dawn Ades’s reading of cosmic instability after World War I, and follow the painting’s journey from a $250 sale in 1932 to MoMA and to Dalí’s own 1954 Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory.

• How the paranoiac-critical method differs from lucid dreaming and why Dalí insisted he was not mad
• Why the only firm clock in the painting is the one swarmed by ants
• The fly casting a human shadow and what it anchors in the dreamscape
• Why a painting of such cultural weight measures only 9.5 by 13 inches
• How the atomic age led Dalí to blow his own masterpiece apart with rigid blocks and bullets