Odors have an altogether peculiar force, in affecting us through association; a force differing essentially from that of objects addressing the touch, the taste, the sight or the hearing.
Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
When I got inside, I just sort of stood there. There's nothing stranger than the smell of someone else's house. The scent goes right to your stomach. Mary's house smelled like lemon furniture polish and oatmeal cookies and logs in a fireplace. For some reason it made me want to curl up in the fetal position. I could have slept right there on their kitchen table.
We are homesick for places, we are reminded of places, it is the sounds and smells and sights of places which haunt us and against which we often measure our present.
Watch them clamber, these swift monkeys! They clamber over one another and thus drag one another into the mud and the depth. They all want to get to the throne: that is their madness — as if happiness sat on the throne. Often, mud sits on the throne — and often the throne also on mud. Mad they all appear to me, clambering monkeys and overardent. Foul smells their idol, the cold monster: foul, they smell to me altogether, these idolators.
Whether we had a (good) moral intuition more developed, we would be as much morally disgusted by the rapacity of those who try to benefit from, and monopolize (or secure or corner), having no consideration (regardless or irrespective of) for others ("autrui", Fr.), than we physically are by a sickening (or nauseating) smell.
The smell of violets, hidden in the green, Pour'd back into my empty soul and frame The times when I remembered to have been Joyful and free from blame.
The smell of violets, hidden in the green, Pour'd back into my empty soul and frame The times when I remembered to have been Joyful and free from blame.