Smells and Bells

In some combination and proportion I can describe my childhood in three smells Fresh Cut Grass The aged pages of books and Gasoline The summers spent at day camp the weekends with my grandparents Gas to get us there falling asleep in the musty air A sunbeam shooting into the reading nook I wake to join my family they're enjoying the country air being lower to the ground the grass reaches my nose In the city the fumes and stenches the proportion of pot and piss remind me that I am close to home It's almost a substitute The gas stations are pockets where the air is almost as heavy as the city The gas feels tangible I keep up with my grandpa We return with doughnuts his musty Benz keeps the scent of the gas in the crackled bench seats we exit the car the grass I can still smell the grass and the gas on his old shirts

Diane Ackerman's Natural History of the Senses, weaved with personal anecdotes and spades of literary examples does plenty to set of my Sixth Sense, the whole thing is a zany experience. There are some small and quiet, yet profound moments, my favorite is probably when she speaks of her memories of eucalyptus, out in the fields with butterflies, and back being a sick child, being smeared in Dr. Vicks. The idea of smell to memory association and how it can change and evolve was the part of the book I was most on board with, where the prose just come to Ackerman. And then there's the rest of the filler non-sense. There were whole pages that were just list examples of other writers weaving the senses into their  works, which just made me want to read those instead. Depending on how one would describe the book to a friend, it could either be a series of short stories based on the human reality and how we actually experience the world with literary comparisons and scientific r...