Today Is the Day for Nautica Voyage
I'm writing thirty posts in thirty days, again. This is number two.
I still believe in the aquatic ape theory, even though it probably isn’t true. How else to explain our fundamental craving for the ocean? In this moment, in Los Angeles, I am close to the sea, but separated by an hour of freeway traffic, which, if I attempted to traverse it, would reveal at least one maniac trying to kill me. The Pacific, for me now, in this moment, is like a lover glimpsed across the lamp-lit ballroom, temptingly close but obscured by curtains of socialites.
And, moreover, how else to explain my love of Nautica Voyage, which isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, the best fragrance I own, but is currently the most worn? If you’re interested in smelling absolutely incredible, this is a better option. But if you’re interested in cloaking yourself in the approximation of water, in a manicured notion of that poignant breeze, Voyage is a fine and extremely affordable choice, at least as good as many luxury aquatic perfumes that cost five to fifteen times more.
It is the smell of a cucumber drink sipped seaside whilst wearing a garland of flowers. Don’t pay too much attention to the question of when you last wore a garland of flowers, it may fill you with a different kind of sadness. I’m not interested in doing that today, although I can’t control your emotions, much as I’d like to. (Could you feel excited for a moment, please?) I just want to remind you that your mind requests the marine, and that there are resources you can apply to this dilemma.
Voyage may remind you of boys who didn’t like you in high school, boys with equestrian sisters, boys who are now heading towards their own upscale midlife crises. But are you so different than they were? They, and you, are both capable of acknowledging your smallness in the face of the surf. Like you, they gaze out at the water, but not at the water itself, but rather its shifting curtains, which lull you into a hypnotic non-perception in which all you’re really seeing is your appetite for geometry, and your lust for the transcendent, which leaves you, always, behind.
You will find that Voyage is quite long-lasting for a fragrance of its price and composition. It’s not capable of delivering the full emotional/conceptual heft of the aquatic, really, but you can’t blame it for that, because neither can you. Sure, you can dream of the trenches of the sea. But look at the futility of that attempt! The blue behind your eyes is ghostly and simplistic. It is a drawing made by a dim infant with a crayon held in the mouth. And then there’s ‘trench,’ what an ignoble word—so close to bench and mensch. Listen—as much as I have admiration for seated Jewish men, they are not the crushing weight of waves.
Speaking of which, let us now recall these words of Robert Lowell, from The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket:
You could cut the brackish winds with a knife
Here in Nantucket, and cast up the time
When the Lord God formed man from the sea’s slime
And breathed into his face the breath of life,
And blue-lung’d combers lumbered to the kill.
The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.
For your convenience, the rainbow of the Lord’s will includes Nautica Voyage. There are idiots on the internet who will tell you that you should hunt for a vintage batch, one with a metal cap, rather than the current plastic one. Forgive them for this banal quibble. They know that they’re filled with longing, but they know not what for.