Evocations
I’m a pretty visually-oriented guy. I enjoy photography, and there’s little
better than to spend a few hours in a good art museum. Although with age my vision is fading from
what it once was, I still enjoy the nuances of light and shadow in a cinematically
brilliant movie or an Impressionist painting. As an English professor, I of course read
voraciously and translate little marks of ink on paper (or, more frequently
these days, on an ebook screen) into vivid images in my mind.
But there’s so much more. We have five senses, not just one, and one of
them has been shown to be directly connected to the parts of the brain that
control memory: Smell.
This has been known, of course, for a long time; the
most famous example is Marcel Proust’s madeleine dipped in tea, which evoked
childhood memories of “the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and
the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their
little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its
surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being,
town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.” (Swann’s Way). But I tend to
relegate this powerful sense to the background—and I suspect I’m not alone. So I spent some time today collecting scents
that evoke powerful memories, my madeleines if you will, and I’d like to share
them. Maybe they’ll evoke something in
you as well, or call up your own associations with other scents. They’re not all pleasant odors, but then not
all memories are pleasant, either.
Freshly
cut Western Red Cedar
Stiff,
never-yet-worn blue jeans
A
rocky Puget Sound beach
Varnish in a woodworker’s shop
Air-dried laundry
Two-cycle
outboard motor exhaust
Sautéing
onions
A mountain lake on a hot summer day
Old National Geographic magazines
A store stocked with leather clothes
The “Tacoma Aroma” (the sulfurous emissions
from pulp mills)
Comet cleaner
Juniper, laurel hedges, a lilac bush,
and lavender
Differential grease and transmission
fluid
Ski wax
Nursing homes
Hot asphalt and tar
Theater popcorn
Dried hay
A dog just back from a swim
Kerosene
Driftwood beach fires
Oil paint
3-in-1 Oil and WD 40
Ozone after a summer rain
School bus diesel exhaust
My dogs and cats pity the poverty of my world, I
think. There’s so much more than just
sight.
