I went to the supermarche today, to buy groceries for the next few or so days, as I do every couple of days. As always, I parked my car in the colossal parking lot, locked the door and slowly strolled towards the entrance in my own particular Kerouac-esque way - hands in pockets, head bent, with a lot on my mind. While making my way towards the entrance, I came across a woman who had just completed the task that awaited me. Plastic bags in hand, she opened her boot right in front of me to put the plethora of recently bought goods into it. And hit me with the most unbearable, the most insufferable scent I could ever imagine. The scent of fabricated coconut and vanilla. Basically, a very, very bad car freshener. I was so affronted by this scent that I raised my head and sped my pace to a light gallop, just to get away from it as soon as humanly possible.
I don't know what it is - perhaps the fact that spring is upon us folks in the northern hemisphere - but my sense of scent has heightened of late. Because all day I've been thinking about that scent (ugh!), as well as others, both pleasant and unpleasant, that I've experienced lately. About a group of pubescent boys waiting at the tram stop whose cheap, supermarche parfum was too overwhelming for me, so overwhelming I had to move away. About the intoxicating aroma of vanilla (proper vanilla) and raspberry muffins filling my kitchen. About the foul stench of urine in dark courtyards that I passed on my way to French lessons. About the scent of freshly mown grass that is beginning to fill the neighbourhood.
Funny thing scent is. A totally underrated sense. And yet, what would we do without it? How would we know if the milk has gone sour? Or whether we left the gas on? Or whether our meal tastes good and as it "should"? Because as Wikipedia says "Olfaction, taste and trigeminal receptors together contribute to flavor. The human tongue can distinguish only among five distinct qualities of taste, while the nose can distinguish among hundreds of substances, even in minute quantities." There's nothing worse for me than having a cold and not being able to taste my food as my nose is closed tight.
But more than the fact that scent can protect us from menacing situations or aids our sense of taste, it can take us to places in our past so embedded in our subconscious that we are totally unaware of them - unless we inhale. For example, for me, the scent of burning beechwood takes me straight back to my grandma's house in Gorski Kotar. Nothing can transport me back there like that smell. I can clearly see her with her black kerchief wrapped around her head, her hand under her chin, sitting in her armchair, looking upon the mountains and forests out of her window. I can see the plastic table cloth upon the table, with the strong black coffee and plain slice of bread atop it, the fire ever burning, all-year round, for besides being a fireplace it was also used as a stove. This banal, insignificant scent reminds me of our conversations, of our walks around the woods and valleys, of her formidable soup which no one it seems can replicate, of her sweet disposition, of how much I miss her.
But no one can express what scent means than the incomparable Proust, who truly put it on the map with his humble madeleine and tea. I'll leave you with an extract of that passage from "Remembrance of things past". Always breath in as deep as you can, with both lungs - well, at least when there are pleasant scents surrounding you...
And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the meantime, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks' windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the shapes of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated segment which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognizable, so in that moment all 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 shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.
Paul Hewson shooting star
Prije 6 god.
