I purchased this book the other day called How to be an Explorer of the World. I was so excited to explore- thinking that I had stumbled upon the key to a lost city or a map that would lead me to an underground lair. But what this guide actually wanted me to do was simply to take a closer look at my immediate surroundings.
I turned to a page called Smell Tour and found a friend of mine on gchat with little else to do but read my stream of consciousness. This task required of me one basic skill: nasal recognition. Now there are a few things in the world of which I can take great pride- I am an excellent bad dancer, I have a lot of friends who still can’t spell my name, and I am fantastic at giving relationship advice that I should probably be taking myself. BUT nothing gives me more to smile/chuckle awkwardly about than my impeccable sense of smell. I chalk this up to too many hours in Biology labs. Formaldehyde smells no better the last time than the first- and I’m pretty sure it does some kind of lasting damage.
A smell tour consists of two basic steps: (1) whiff (2) describe. My friend was kind of enough to suggest that I give him a smell tour of only the main floor of my parent’s house. A favor to the lifespan of my olfactory nerves… however, this includes several rooms that have some really intense smells. Intense and intensely complicated. The powder room does not smell like powder and the living room does not smell like… living? The hall closet smells like 9 years of dog walking jacket, old flip flops and accidental gum-sidewalk reunions. The den smells like vases, old photos, piles of mail with that glossy ink and dust in hard to reach places. The dining room smells like fresh wood cabinets with musky china and silver polish and left-over smoke from blown out candles.
The truth is- that nothing really smelled like anything because too much smelled like everything. These weren’t smells, they were just memories- and I was so mad at this book for trying to convince me otherwise. I apologized to my friend online and flipped a few pages to search for any task that would redeem the 20 dollars I had forked over for this waste of paper. This book asked me to find words, watch clocks, read old newspapers, name colors after people, and start a collection of objects inspired by the first thing I saw. It contained quotes by Calvino, Einstein, Emerson and Vonnegut- all amounting to the same idea. At a certain point, apparently, we as humans forget to live where we live- in our cities, homes and bodies. We learn what we are capable of in grandiose terms, and forget what we are capable of as far as a connection to our being- our senses, thoughts and imaginations of here and now. We live in the future or the past, but rarely ever in the present- and then, to quote a fan of yellow submarines, life happens while we are busy making other plans.
What was funny to me, about this book, is that those words of brilliant minds asked of the reader not to contemplate anything deeply intellectual or mentally taxing, but instead to step back into our minds and bodies and to complete a task so simple that one could be annoyed merely by the suggestion. Roses smell like Spring, a high school date on Valentine’s Day and the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. But they also smell like roses- and sometimes that is all they need to be.
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