A Natural History of the Senses

"I’m cribbing here a little bit, but I think it’s a great description: it is a grand tour of the senses with Diane Ackerman playing tour guide. It’s not a narrative, it’s really more of a highlight reel of interesting observations and colourful stories about the senses. Just as an example, she writes about how Napoleon asked Joséphine not to bathe for two weeks before he saw her because he wanted to relish her full personal odour. She writes about how Victorian lovers, as a token of their affection, would rub apples under their armpits and exchange them to share their sweat-smell with one another. It’s little things like that that stick with you. I find it to be a haunting book in the sense that I’ll be going about my daily routine and then suddenly have these little flashbacks to observations that she made. She takes you to places that you can’t help but return to over and over again, that make you think a little bit differently. It doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive, but it’s a very pleasurable little tour. Absolutely. I think we each have our own terroir. For sure. This process of embracing these forgotten senses has completely transformed my experience of the world. That’s manifest in everything from relishing these momentary escapes into beauty, to picking up on nuances about the rhythm of the block where I live in New York. It’s funny, I have recently noticed that I’m also much more sensitive to smells than I used to be, in a way that is sometimes a liability. If I get into a car that smells very strongly, it’s very hard for me. This is a bit personal, but speaking of the smells of people, I think that we’re so attuned to our own smells that we can’t smell ourselves, but recently I have been able to smell myself. It is a mindfuck. It is so weird, and I haven’t yet figured out why it’s happening. I don’t know if I’m using a different combination of shampoo or conditioner, or if it’s something about the way I’m washing my clothes. It’s become a mystery. It’s funny that you asked that because I do think that, in the same way that you judge a wine because of its smell, I see people a little bit differently because of their smells. The effect of training my senses is similar to having spent years in a foreign country without knowing the language and then suddenly being able to understand the conversations going on around you. When you finally learn the language, you realize how much you’ve been missing. I even take pleasure from bad odours. I think that being able to distinguish that the smell of the subway on a given day is unwashed human rather than stale urine actually does add something to my life, as dubious as that sounds. Yes, totally, and it makes memories sharper. Being able to put language to a particular odour is a very powerful thing. It allows you to immerse yourself in an experience in a much deeper way."