A Natural History of the Senses Read Online Free PDF

Baudelaire’s plunges into smell until his “soul soars upon perfume as the souls of other men soar upon music”; Milton’s description of the odors God finds pleasing to His divine nostrils and those preferred by Satan, an ace sniffer-out of carrion (“Of carnage, prey innumerable … scent of living carcasses”); Robert Herrick’s fetishistic and intimate sniffing of his sweetheart, whose “breast, lips, hands, thighs, legs … are all/ richly aromatical,” indeed “All the spices of the East/ Are circumfused there”; Walt Whitman’s praise of sweat’s “aroma finer than prayer”; François Mauriac’s
La Robe Prétexte
, which is adolescence remembered through its smells; Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale,” where we find one of the first mentions in literature of breath deodorants; Shakespeare’s miraculously delicate flower similes (to the violet he says: “Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal the sweet, if not from my love’s breath?”); Czeslaw Milosz’s linen closet, “filled with the mute tumult of memories”;Joris-Karl Huysmans’s obsession with nasal hallucinations, and the smell of liqueurs and women’s sweat that fills his lush, almost unimaginably decadent, hedonistic novel,
A Rebours
. About one character, Huysmans explained that she was “an ill-balanced, nerve-ridden woman, who loved to have her nipples macerated in scents, but who really experienced a genuine and overmastering ecstasy when her head was tickled with a comb and she could, in the act of being caressed by a lover, breathe the smell of the chimney soot, of wet from a house building in rainy weather, or of dust of a summer storm.”
    The most scent-drenched poem of all time, “The Song of Solomon,” avoids talk of body or even natural odors, and yet weaves a luscious love story around perfumes and unguents. In the story’s arid lands, where water was rare, people perfumed themselves often and well, and this betrothed couple, whose marriage day approaches, in the meantime converse amorously in poetry, sweetly dueling with compliments lavish and ingenious. When he dines at her table he is “a bundle of myrrh” or “a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of En-ge-di,” or muscular and sleek as a “young gazelle.” To him, her robust virginity is a secret “garden … a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.” Her lips “drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon.” He tells her that on their wedding night he will enter her garden, and he catalogues all the fruits and spices he knows he’ll find there: frankincense, myrrh, saffron, camphire, pomegranates, aloes, cinnamon, calamus, and other treasures. She will weave a fabric of love around him, and fill his senses until they brim with oceanic extravagance. So stirred is she by this loving tribute and so wild with desire that she replies yes, she will throw open the gates of her garden to him: “Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.”
    In the macabre contemporary novel
Perfume
, by Patrick Süskind, the hero, who lives in Paris in the eighteenth century, is a man born without any personal scent whatsoever, although he develops prodigiouspowers of smell: “Soon he was no longer smelling mere wood, but kinds of wood: maple wood, oak wood, pinewood, elm wood, pearwood, old, young, rotting, moldering, mossy wood, down to single logs, chips, and splinters—and could clearly differentiate them as objects in a way that other people could not have done by sight.” When he drinks a glass of milk each day, he can smell the mood of the cow it has come from; out walking, he can easily identify the origin of any smoke. His lack of human scent frightens people, who treat him badly, and this warps his personality. He ultimately creates personal odors for himself that