Lately I’ve been smelling things, which is true because I always have, and while I suppose that my declared mission in life might revolve around syllables like “love” or “truth,” there is a different purpose I’ve been fulfilling more effectively—that of a person attending to the needs of his nose, inhaling everything possible, gathering the infinitesimal particles thrown off by a rotting tree or an exfoliated face or a damp wad of cotton, assembling them all in memory, such that they’ve formed, in my mind, a database of odors—although the word database isn’t quite right, connoting as it does a congregation of well-groomed data, when in fact it’s a bit more like a marketplace, with vendors hawking goods fragrant or otherwise—brandy left in a cup all night, the golden decay of an attic, bread becoming itself—each essence conjuring another world within that world, the final effect being that of a concatenation of nested impressions only united by the chance-based confines of a single short life—like a piece of disjointed theatre played by thousands of actors who age both backwards and forwards, or, if the Simile Police will allow me to reach for one more nugget of the commodity they control humorlessly, gimlet-eyed and holding crystal machetes, like a convoluted sentence, which might wind briefly around the smell, for example, of Mumbai in the morning (petrol with a hint of chicken liver), which I sampled in 2018, while I was hanging out the open door of one of that city’s trains, seeing shanties and skyscrapers sprawling so far they illustrated the earth’s curvature, a visual thrill that temporarily allowed me to forget that many Indian commuters have been beheaded by a passing utility pole while enjoying similar reveries, whether or not they were going to the little boutique I was going to, where I was surprised and pleased, after I somehow retained my head, to catch the scent of Le Labo Santal 33, a sandalwood-based perfume I’d worn a few years before.
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Five Brief Remarks About Le Labo Santal 33
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Lately I’ve been smelling things, which is true because I always have, and while I suppose that my declared mission in life might revolve around syllables like “love” or “truth,” there is a different purpose I’ve been fulfilling more effectively—that of a person attending to the needs of his nose, inhaling everything possible, gathering the infinitesimal particles thrown off by a rotting tree or an exfoliated face or a damp wad of cotton, assembling them all in memory, such that they’ve formed, in my mind, a database of odors—although the word database isn’t quite right, connoting as it does a congregation of well-groomed data, when in fact it’s a bit more like a marketplace, with vendors hawking goods fragrant or otherwise—brandy left in a cup all night, the golden decay of an attic, bread becoming itself—each essence conjuring another world within that world, the final effect being that of a concatenation of nested impressions only united by the chance-based confines of a single short life—like a piece of disjointed theatre played by thousands of actors who age both backwards and forwards, or, if the Simile Police will allow me to reach for one more nugget of the commodity they control humorlessly, gimlet-eyed and holding crystal machetes, like a convoluted sentence, which might wind briefly around the smell, for example, of Mumbai in the morning (petrol with a hint of chicken liver), which I sampled in 2018, while I was hanging out the open door of one of that city’s trains, seeing shanties and skyscrapers sprawling so far they illustrated the earth’s curvature, a visual thrill that temporarily allowed me to forget that many Indian commuters have been beheaded by a passing utility pole while enjoying similar reveries, whether or not they were going to the little boutique I was going to, where I was surprised and pleased, after I somehow retained my head, to catch the scent of Le Labo Santal 33, a sandalwood-based perfume I’d worn a few years before.