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You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/mar/01/human-history-fragrance-wood-smoke-senses
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| Version 1 | Version 2 |
|---|---|
| All human history in a fragrance | All human history in a fragrance |
| (6 months later) | |
| As my poor mother’s eyes mist over with cataracts, I give constant thanks for my own sight. This morning as I heard wild swans bugling faintly high over the house I thought also of friends who now have to wear hearing devices in their ears. | As my poor mother’s eyes mist over with cataracts, I give constant thanks for my own sight. This morning as I heard wild swans bugling faintly high over the house I thought also of friends who now have to wear hearing devices in their ears. |
| Yet what of our sense of smell? Isn’t it, of all senses, massively underrated? | Yet what of our sense of smell? Isn’t it, of all senses, massively underrated? |
| The perfume that leads me to ponder all this has the power of music to awaken so much personal history. For some reason, it’s a smell that reminds me of my 20s and mornings in Nepal, but also of any place where the houses are timber-made and traffic noise absent. It’s also the very essence of autumn and as central to that season as those childhood hoards of leaves so high-piled in the woods that we could almost swim through them. | The perfume that leads me to ponder all this has the power of music to awaken so much personal history. For some reason, it’s a smell that reminds me of my 20s and mornings in Nepal, but also of any place where the houses are timber-made and traffic noise absent. It’s also the very essence of autumn and as central to that season as those childhood hoards of leaves so high-piled in the woods that we could almost swim through them. |
| It’s not only my past I can identify, but all our pasts. I remember thinking in Africa once how this very odour implied change to whole continents. Its consequences were laid out like an immense blackened beast over the entire countryside. | It’s not only my past I can identify, but all our pasts. I remember thinking in Africa once how this very odour implied change to whole continents. Its consequences were laid out like an immense blackened beast over the entire countryside. |
| At its edges it was all yellow-toothed and devouring the vegetation, while overhead, through the crackling heat-haze, came bee-eaters and kites to snatch insects fleeing before its advance. | At its edges it was all yellow-toothed and devouring the vegetation, while overhead, through the crackling heat-haze, came bee-eaters and kites to snatch insects fleeing before its advance. |
| The smell of which I speak is, in a sense, the scent of all human culture. Not just the cave’s thick atmosphere that blurred the Palaeolithic images flickering on the walls. It is the smell of cooked food, the smithy’s forge and of combustion that makes steam. It is still there implied in all those things brewed by industry and now it’s a smell about all our futures. | The smell of which I speak is, in a sense, the scent of all human culture. Not just the cave’s thick atmosphere that blurred the Palaeolithic images flickering on the walls. It is the smell of cooked food, the smithy’s forge and of combustion that makes steam. It is still there implied in all those things brewed by industry and now it’s a smell about all our futures. |
| It’s the aroma that turned carbon into the dark cloud hanging over us all. It has just the faintest whiff of calving icebergs and even a vision of polar bears, all white wool and sagging bones in pools of melted ice. | It’s the aroma that turned carbon into the dark cloud hanging over us all. It has just the faintest whiff of calving icebergs and even a vision of polar bears, all white wool and sagging bones in pools of melted ice. |
| Yet, strangely it is one of my favourite fragrances: wood-smoke, from logs that I cut from our trees and stack and burn, to keep us warm all winter long. | Yet, strangely it is one of my favourite fragrances: wood-smoke, from logs that I cut from our trees and stack and burn, to keep us warm all winter long. |