Smell of a Person

     My great-grandparents lived in Cleveland until my great-grandpa died.  Their house (and inevitably them) had such a distinct smell to it.  As soon as we arrived and hugged and kissed my grandma, you could smell it on her.  Smells of fresh strudel and warm bread wafted through the house, but a pungent reek of mothballs rivaled for control of the air.  There were open boxes of them in almost every room, just leaking their synthetic camphor scent into the house.  Perhaps my great-grandma lived through a now-forgotten tragedy of history, the great pestilence, when clouds of carpet moths drifted over the Tatra Mountains and laid waste to the once-famous wardrobes of Slovakia, leaving behind nothing but scanty remains of clothing.  Of course this only exacerbated what I'm sure my great-great-grandparents considered the real plague on the nation:  the teenagers' sluttiness of dress, pale ankles showing and babushka pushed back to reveal a dangerous amount of forehead.

Diane Ackerman

  I won't go into why I don't like Ackerman's writing as you guys have already heard me complain in class.  In the section on touch, Ackerman briefly describes her experience at a psychic fair.  First and foremost, I find it amusing anytime someone illustrates the absurdity of superstition.  Secondly, I enjoy Ackerman's writing much more when she writes in more of a narrative form like she does here, and also when she talks to the perfumer.  She gets away from what I sometimes find a pretentious tone, generated by a barrage of information and overly saturated sentences.

Smells

     Rather than write about the earthy, fresh scent of vegetables and fruits that I was constantly handling throughout my childhood, or the nostalgia of the dank, musty, nearly tangible air that sat in my grandparent's cottage, or sticky pine sap or an old accordion, I want to write about the worst smell of my life.  Maybe if I had gotten closer to a rotting deer, I mean really shove my nose where it wouldn't want to be I would have to relegate this smell to runner-up on this pungent rostrum.  But I haven't, so here it is. 

     I must have smelled it when I was seven years old and I can still feel it way up there in my nostrils.  It was then I realized all the terrible things that you could go through in life.  Innocence was lost; my childhood was stripped of a little piece of beauty and wonder.  My family was at a banquet or a party, you know, the very last place a kid wants to be.  However, the abundance of balloons drifting through the hall made it a little more bearable.  I grabbed a bundle of their ribbons and hauled the anchor off the table.  Curious, I tore off the red mylar wrapping around the weight and saw what looked like a conglomerate of hardened sand.  It had to be smelled.  It just had to. 

     It really didn't.  It really didn't.  I suspect I was a coke addict in a past life, because I didn't just sniff it, I snorted it.  The chemical just stayed up there, smacking my olfactory organs until they only recognized this terrible beast dominating them.  I could not smell anything except this one single scent for days.  While I was lying in bed, while I was building Lego's, while I ate.  It made everything in life terrible.  I survived and emerged a wiser child.

Short Takes #1: David Sedaris - Me Talk Pretty One Day, Salman Rushdie - Water's Edge

I find Sedaris’ writing to have a unique humor and charm that entertains and allows a distracted reader such as myself to pay attention to every word.  As someone who is currently learning French, this essay resonated with me in that regard as well.  The nonsense words placed throughout the teacher’s dialogue gives the reader a sense of how Sedaris and the other students felt.  His description of the teacher’s actions and aggressiveness were hilarious.  His message came across clear to me, and the reader gets to experience a bit of that smugness he felt when he finally understood all of the teacher’s insults.

An Emulation of Montaigne

Features of Montaigne’s essays:

1. Casual/conversational tone, yet use of perhaps pretentious, albeit archaic language

2. Digresses, but returns to end at a solid point (clear purpose)

3.  Erudite; allusions and quotes from the “classics”

4. Male-centric (“he”, “his”, “him”, “man”, etc)

  

Of Those We May Call Loafers

            Whilst I allow my mind to roam, I have become acutely aware to not only the contradictions our individual minds possess, but also those contradictions which occur in what one might refer to as our culture’s collective mind.  As is often proposed to us from such an early age that a man could not recall when or where he sat as he first heard the suggestion, our worth is determined by not only what kind of person we become but the industry we submit our ambition to.  The gentleness one’s hands may possess seems half-so important as the gold that rests in them.  The learned and powerful disseminate articles and manuscripts to the masses (chief amongst them a so-called Monsieur Forbes, most assuredly a collective nom de plume of executives), that celebrate wealth and production, and seek to remind us all that these are the individuals who captain our ship; that society follows where they bear their lantern.  Upon viewing one such segment of writing, I recollected a quote of one such “rough” inhabitant of the New World:

            “If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being       regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”

            (Henry David Thoreau, Walden)

While we may say we respect the meek, the kind, the calm and contemplative, we surely do not show it.  Men live their lives in aspiration of building a tangible legacy, a physical evidence of his time among us.  This is more than accepted: this is encouraged.  Yet before I would start at making a legacy to be remembered, I think of Shelley’s poem regarding such things.  After all, it is not those that build temples of ego and stain the sand red, but instead those who wander in the desert whom we remember.  We forget the king but remember the hermit.  Ask any of your fellow men, and they will recall Bhudda before Śuddhodana, Christ before Tiberius.