QotD: Heaven Scent
What is your favorite scent?
Submitted by Erinen.
Short Answer: Mah Woman, and lilies.
Long Answer: Finally, a QotD that won't result in having my dead
grandmother appearing to me saying "I thought we agreed you wouldn't
write about this."
As we all know, or at least those of us that have read the seminal
works of Tom Robbins, most specifically, his most wonderful book Jitterbug Perfume, smell is perhaps the least understood and most psychologically entrenched of all the five senses. And for those familiar with The Ice Storm,
we have Elijah Wood's creepy insight into how smell is like taste and
the quandary of when you go into a particularly pungent public lavatory.
Taking the painstaking (and obviously showboaty) literary allusions
further still, combining them with Marcel Proust's Swann's Way from À la recherche du temps perdu,
smell is like an experiential time machine that transports us back to
not just a memory but to an Overwhelming State of Being akin to déjà vu. And leave it up to the Japanese to try to make this marketable.
Essentially, scent is that incomprehensible make-or-break life raft we
find ourselves clinging to in the storm of life that gives us that
much-needed comfort and stability. So yes, the smell of Mah Woman makes
me happy and calm, and connects me to her not only in a way I'll never
understand but one that also rails against that constructed superego
and tells me "Doc, just STFU and enjoy the enchanting bliss that is
your purty smellin' little girl." As for lilies? Who knows? All I do know
is I want a ton of Casablancas at my viewing/wake/whatever so anyone
who gave a shit about me can taste with their noses that which brought
me so much mysterious pleasure in life.
Comments
(gushing pride and glee). That's my man!