The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking itself.
—Lewis Thomas, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony
The great pleasure in having spent the last years thinking about smelling is that my world has changed color. It smells. Well, it has always smelled, just as the light bouncing amidst the reds and greens of our palette are the unnoticed ultraviolets and infrareds that the honeybee and pit snake attend to. But I had not bothered to open my mind to the smells.
What has not happened is that I have become an expert in smelling. Nor am I constantly ringing with Proustian experiences, inflating ephemeral bubbles of memories with each inhale. I lived for over forty years not attending particularly to the smelloftheworld, in e. e. cummings’s phrasing; so now there are only a handful of memories to reawaken. But I am now smelling all over the place. I put my nose to things without fear and with interest. I smell the skunkiness of bitter coffee beans swirled into ice cream. The loamy smell of the park after rain.I I smell when the previous occupant of our building’s elevator has opened a new glossy magazine as she rode home. I smell someone’s sudden urge to clean his hands with a sanitizing wipe while on the bus.
A summer trip in the car is not complete without notes of gasoline, cut grass, honeysuckle, warmed vinyl, sunscreen, overheated-dog breath, and wet sandals, stirred by wind from the open windows or wafting up from the floorboards.
I smell a thunderstorm approaching on my last visit to Colorado, the home of my family during my childhood, when I come to help clean out the house after my father’s death. The watery, fresh smell of sea air comes, I now know, from ozone carried down from higher altitudes on the winds of a storm.II It is also the odor of the city when I emerge after swimming, the receptors pinging chlorine! silent for a long enough moment for me to smell the world in its absence.
I smell gin on the man who sits next to me in 10C.
I smell the acrid, lingering piles of freshly turned, festering wood chips on the other side of the park.
I see two people with a dog; then a second later smell that dog’s poo, which must’ve recently been deposited in a trash bin.
I smell the art room at kindergarten before seeing it.
I smell every book I open.
I smell the clove antiseptic paste that screams dental office.
On return from a trip, I smell the way our apartment smells to those who do not live in it. I see that it is not difficult to know there are dogs living in it.
I smell how long ago an office door was last opened.
My nose captures vernal smells: the incomplete and jagged smells of fall, caught in winter, and finally released from their hibernation in spring.
One summer day I retronasally smell a good peach—slurpilly juicy—and orthonasally take in scrubbed sidewalks, a fetid sewer puddle, a vinegar sharpness.
I smell blue cheese in the building; Magic Marker on the street; cucumber on the east side of the park, steeping tea on the west side.
I smell my friends (sorry, friends, I have smelled you). Each person in my world has a “smell-face,” as my great colleague Dr. Oliver Sacks once described it, and it is neither terrific nor terrifying; it simply rings of them.
I smell the wet wool on my fingers after coming in from a winter storm; coffee on my fingers after handling a takeout cup.
When I wake up, I take a moment to smell if my son or husband—or both—are still in bed. When I return home, I smell who has returned home before me.
When I awaken from the rare nap, I try to smell the time of day.
I smell burnt rubber by the train, smoked mozzarella in the Bronx, warmed pine needles in the forest.
Perhaps I will revisit these smells in another forty years and be brought back to these days, when I lived with a young boy, a youngish man, two great dogs, and an accidental cat, and headed into my books nose-first.
I have now dreamed of smells—smells of people I love; and unknown, unsmelled smells concocted by my unconscious brain. Awake, I can now call forth a smell imaginatively, in my mind’s nose. If I consider the smell of a penny . . . there, I’ve got it, the familiar waft that is really the smell not of copper and zinc but of copper and zinc handled by persons. As I write the word lavender (lavender . . . lavender . . . ) I can conjure up the soapiness of the dried plant, sachet-ready. I look at a photograph of my father’s desk, and the slightly sharp and resinous smell of its inside, mixed with pencil shavings and loose tobacco, hits me, just as if I had opened the drawer itself.
Smells precede us and remain after we leave: our presence is thus extended in a place. Watching the dogs has allowed me to extend the dimensions of perception.
Ultimately what I have learned to do is simply to bother to attend to smells. This was enabled by making associations—with words and with images—to fix my mind on a smell and then to curl it into a slip of memory. The pictorial and verbal vocabulary I am collecting is what clears access not just to current perception, but to my being able to smell more next time I nose a rose. In some important way, I realize that this is the opposite of being a dog, though. I am taking advantage of something that we have that the dog does not—the words that describe, and simply accompany my experience. So I must assume that I am not reproducing Finn’s experience.
While smells now appear to me more public—they are out there to be detected by a nose—I am evermore appreciative of the privacy of smells. Odors may blow in from across the river or waft through an open window from outside, but the greatest majority of smells need to be nearly touched to be perceived. Smell is a private sense, reserved for those people and objects we literally bring close to us. By smelling what my dog does, it brings me closer to him.
Today—as I will do tomorrow, and the next tomorrow—I head out the door with both my dogs. I watch their idle sniffs, their exploratory sniffs, their communicative sniffs, their pushy sniffs. When my dogs poke their noses in the earth, I pause to let them. I feel a frisson of excitement—both from knowing some of what is happening, and from the realization that I will never really know what is happening.
I will never smell as a dog does. I accept it. It is dogs’ difference I celebrate—and their ways of smelling—their very noses—are different. Quiet distillers of a world that we have stood up from and forgotten.
I. geosmin: “a metabolic by-product of bacteria or blue-green algae.”
II. Its “freshness” led to the earlier erroneous claim that ozone was health-bringing.