I'm going for the smell. The fragrance of a woman, the smell of travel, the smells of childhood... The New Times analyzed the interethnic characteristics of the perception of pleasant and unpleasant aromas.
He listened to a gentleman who said to another: “it’s funny how they smell the same, burnt through the perfume, all these dry, pretty brown-haired girls,” and, as often happens, vulgarity, related to no one knows what, tightly wrapped around the memory, feeding on his sadness.
Vladimir Nabokov "Spring in Fialta"
Imagine the impossible: the sense of smell, as a sense organ, is no more. That is, there are smells, but people, having retained the ability to hear, see, feel something by touch, have lost the ability to distinguish smells. Moreover, they never knew of their existence.
"ABOUT! No! No no!" - the owners of the perfume and tobacco industries, the owners of brands and brands would have exclaimed. Most would go bankrupt, the most cunning would retrain as designers. Those who had talents and abilities would have taken up music. But everything would be alien, unusual. We would lose a significant part of our memories. And no wonder, because the memory of aromas - no matter what, pleasant or repulsive - is deeper than visual memory. The ability to distinguish smells is one of the most ancient abilities; it is not for nothing that the olfactory center is located on the lower surface of the temporal and frontal lobes, in the “oldest” part of the brain, in the olfactory brain, in the so-called sea horse gyrus - the hippocampus, or ammon horn. And the work of this center depends, as scientists say, on the formation of emotions, and even motivation.
But scientists are scientists, and ordinary people not without reason say: "to hear smells." Just hear and nothing else. This is probably the most appropriate verb.
For us, who still have the gift of smell, a world without smells would be a nightmare: a truncated world, devoid of something very important. Perhaps the most important.
little babies
If you think about it, smells can be associated with time. Thanks to smells, we reproduce in memory many moments of a past life, sometimes down to seemingly insignificant trifles. It's amazing that the house I grew up in no longer exists, and the smell of every room, every thing, furniture is still with me. What about the smell of kerosene? Every weekend I asked adults to go to the market, just to be in a kerosene shop. He was a funny, hunchbacked uncle, he was always clean-shaven, he always sat on a barrel with the inscription "Kerosene" and smoked "Shipka". That's "Shipka" and "Shiprom" from him and smelled.
The preserved smells of childhood allow you to feel the smells of adult life more subtly. For example, the dark halls of cinemas in childhood had a completely different smell than the current ones. No, it's not just the smell of popcorn, the fact is that even ice cream in a waffle cup will never smell like it did in childhood. And not because childhood ended a long time ago, but because both waffles and ice cream itself are completely different. And that former smell has already imprinted, and its trace will always be with us. Everything here is like in a well-known experiment, when the newly born were allowed to sniff a tampon soaked in the smell of their mother, and if the babies were given to other mothers, they began to cry, but as soon as they were returned to their own mother, they, smelling their native smell, blissfully fell to the mother's breast. We are all little babies...
The memory of the "sound" of some smells is longer than themselves. So, for example, the smells of the streets of the Old City in Jerusalem sound to the author. Indeed, by smell you can distinguish cities and countries, even, perhaps, continents. Africa smells differently than Europe, where one country smells different from another. And everyone knows how fragrant Russia is, what aromas the notorious smoke of the fatherland brings with it. Let's take at least our entrances... No, we won't take them, but rather we'll hold our noses, quickly dart into our apartment, filled with the favorite and close smells of its inhabitants.
However, in our life, those smells that are commonly called "unpleasant" often play a big role. They not only turn us away, but, surprisingly, they attract us. Let's remember the hero of the film "Scent of a Woman" performed by the great Al Pacino. He, blinded by an accident, could not only judge women by their smell, by what soap and what perfume they use. With the help of his heightened sense of smell, the hero could also hear the change in the emotional state of the person speaking to him, he could identify the scoundrel and the bastard by smell alone.
Man without properties
The odorless man is a monster. Such was, for example, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the hero of Patrick Suskind's novel Perfumer, who turned people away from himself by not having his own human scent. Despite being born in the stinkiest place in Paris. Perhaps that is why nature rewarded Grenouille with a phenomenal sense of smell and intuition of an unsurpassed perfumer. Not having his own smell, Grenouille perfectly distinguished the smells of the world around him.
Yes, the villains, most likely, have their own, special amber. But just the smell of an unwashed body is not always as unpleasant as it is commonly believed. American geneticists Klaus Wederkind and Sandra Fury suggested that their students not change T-shirts for several days and not use deodorants and perfumes, and then, after mixing the stale T-shirts in one pile, they asked them to choose from it the one whose smell would be most pleasant. It turned out, firstly, that men and women invariably choose the smell of members of the opposite sex, and often evaluate it as attractive, and not at all as repulsive. Secondly, the smells of those representatives of the opposite sex who were the most genetically distant were the most attractive. Wederkind and Fury suggested that the whole thing is in the MNC gene lying on the sixth chromosome, the protein of which is involved in the determination by the body's immune system of its own and foreign proteins. In other words, for us it is preferable, as it were, twice “strangers”, representatives of the opposite sex and those with whom the union poses a “genetic” threat to possible offspring to a lesser extent. But even before the experience of Wederkind and Fury, breeders knew that sows were attracted to the smell of the extract from the seminal glands of the boar. They used this when they wanted to breed pigs with the desired characteristics. And then cunning perfumers, adding the same extract to the fragrance of very expensive, limited-edition men's perfumes and creams, created a whole series of “seductive perfumes”. So it turns out that we are far from always and everywhere attracted by the fresh aroma of perfume, or deodorant, or even a cleanly washed body.
Fashion for smells
So - dreamed up and will be. We don't smell anywhere. And producers of smells in general a pipe. According to them, according to the history of well-known and not very brands, one can draw up a peculiar picture of the development of culture. The time of heavy floral fragrances (remember Grushnitsky, who poured perfume taken from Pechorin on his neckerchief) gave way to times when subtler scents became fashionable, then the “flowers” returned again. Olfactory fashion has changed, as has fashion for clothes. After all, the world of smells is the same system of signs as any other. Is there really an expression “the aroma of a beautiful life” for nothing: the smell of the interior of an expensive car, natural, without the addition of tobacco flavors, good fabrics, natural products. The smell of an expensive perfume is attached to this list only for someone to be accepted as their own. These signs dictate their own rules, and if today you want to perfume yourself with “Red Moscow”, you should remember where you are going and with whom you will communicate: after all, for many, the aroma of “Red Moscow” is associated on a deep, conscious level that is not amenable to conscious analysis with empty shelves in stores. , with queues. Including - and for the same "Red Moscow". No, perhaps better than Chanel No. 5!
Smell is more than just a single scent. It is not for nothing that a good nose, the ability to keep your nose to the wind are, perhaps, synonymous with success and awareness. And - sneakiness. No wonder there is a saying "he has a good scent." The scent is not only for expensive perfumes, but also for the smell of good luck or the smell of misfortune. The very “logic” of smells helped Grenouille discover that girls are the same flowers, the fragrance can and should be taken away from them, acting according to the rules of the art of perfumery, and a new essence appeared next to the bottles of rose water and jasmine essence. A monster, a killer - and a scent of bliss and love that makes you forget about everything. The whole mystery of the world of smells is rooted in this seemingly impossible union.
But riddles are riddles, but how wonderful it is, waking up in the morning, to feel the smell of freshly brewed coffee and hot bread. Nothing in the world can be more blissful than these aromas! And you begin to understand that you woke up not in vain ...
This smell, mixed with the freshness of the autumn park, Ganin now tried to catch again, but, as you know, memory resurrects everything except smells, and nothing resurrects the past so completely as the smell once associated with it.
Vladimir Nabokov "Mashenka"
It seemed to the gendarme, who was escorting the convict from the courtroom, that she had become calmer. She guessed that he served in Algiers, and even said what kind of cologne he uses, because once she had an acquaintance who perfumed himself with it.
