A Natural History of the Senses Read Free Page B

beginning and the end. At birth, we inhale for the first time; at death, we exhale for the last. In between, through all the lather of one’s life, each breath passes air over our olfactory sites. Each day, we breathe about 23,040 times and move around 438 cubic feet of air. It takes us about five seconds to breathe—two seconds to inhale and threeseconds to exhale—and, in that time, molecules of odor flood through our systems. Inhaling and exhaling, we smell odors. Smells coat us, swirl around us, enter our bodies, emanate from us. We live in a constant wash of them. Still, when we try to describe a smell, words fail us like the fabrications they are. Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world. But they are shapes, they bring the world into focus, they corral ideas, they hone thoughts, they paint watercolors of perception. Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood
chronicles the mischief of two murderers who collaborated on a particularly nasty crime. A criminal psychologist, trying to explain the event, observed that neither one of them would have been capable of the crime separately, but together they formed a third person, someone who was able to kill. I think of metaphors as a more benign but equally potent example of what chemists call hypergolic. You can take two substances, put them together, and produce something powerfully different (table salt), sometimes even explosive (nitroglycerine). The charm of language is that, though it’s human-made, it can on rare occasions capture emotions and sensations which aren’t. But the physiological links between the smell and language centers of the brain are pitifully weak. Not so the links between the smell and the memory centers, a route that carries us nimbly across time and distance. Or the links between our other senses and language. When we see something, we can describe it in gushing detail, in a cascade of images. We can crawl along its surface like an ant, mapping each feature, feeling each texture, and describing it with visual adjectives like red, blue, bright, big, and so on. But who can map the features of a smell? When we use words such as smoky, sulfurous, floral, fruity, sweet, we are describing smells in terms of other things (smoke, sulfur, flowers, fruit, sugar). Smells are our dearest kin, but we cannot remember their names. Instead we tend to describe how they make us feel. Something smells “disgusting,” “intoxicating,” “sickening,” “pleasurable,” “delightful,” “pulse-revving,” “hypnotic,” or “revolting.”
    My mother once told me about a drive she and my father took through the Indian River orange groves in Florida when the trees were thick with blossom and the air drenched with fragrance. Itoverwhelmed her with pleasure. “What does it smell like?” I asked. “Oh, it’s delightful, an intoxicating delightful smell.” “But what does that smell
smell
like?” I asked again. “Like oranges?” If so, I might buy her some eau de cologne, which has been made of neroli (attar of oranges), bergamot (from orange rind), and other minor ingredients since its creation in the eighteenth century, when it was the favorite of Madame du Barry. (Although the use of neroli itself as a perfume probably goes back to the days of the Sabines.) “Oh, no,” she said with certainty, “not at all like oranges. It’s a delightful smell. A wonderful smell.” “Describe it,” I begged. And she threw up her hands in despair.
    Try it now. Describe the smell of your lover, your child, your parent. Or even one of the aromatic clichés most people, were they blindfolded, could recognize by smell alone: a shoe store, a bakery, a church, a butcher shop, a library. But can you describe the smell of your favorite chair, of your attic or your car? In
The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests
, novelist Paul West writes that “blood smells like dust.” An arresting metaphor, one that relies on indirection, as metaphors of smell almost