Lavender

It's spring, and my neighborhood is full of flowers.  I breathe in the smell with a smile as I walk or run down the sidewalk.  Once in a while, rounding a corner, I suddenly catch a faint scent of daphne.

Daphne.  The slightest whiff, and I'm thrown back to the age of 13, possibly 12.  We had moved to a new house.  In the basement was a storage room we called the "fruit room," with a screened vent to the outside.  Outside the vent was a bush of daphne, whose scent filled the basement.  The new house, the novel sweet scent of daphne, the age of 13.  All mixed up in my mind.

I'm 13, it's spring, and my brother's practicing the piano, against his will. He's playing "To a Wild Rose," a tune that ever since has been attached to the smell of daphne.  My brother and I have just met the other kids in the neighborhood.  Some we would know for years; others moved away shortly after we arrived.  But my memory of those first few kids we met is engulfed in the scent of daphne.  About the same time, my mother suggested a book she'd just read, a memoir written by the mother of gifted 13-year-old twins.  Their clever and imaginative  lives fascinated me.  I wouldn't know where to find that book, now.  I have no idea of its title.  But my memory of that book -- or the memory of my reactions to reading it -- also is bathed in daphne.

Scent and memory are powerfully linked. 

[T]he olfactory nerve is located very close to the amygdala, the area of the brain that is connected to the experience of emotion as well as emotional memory. In addition, the olfactory nerve is very close to the hippocampus, which is associated with memory.  

So says an on-line source of unknown authority.

Proust knew all about it.  In his Á la Recherche du Temps Perdu, his protagonist famously experiences vivid flashbacks to childhood from the taste (scent) of a madeleine cake.  Not surprisingly, André Aciman, a well-known author, and a specialist in the works of Proust, has had similar experiences, experiences he describes in his essay "Lavender."

"Lavender" is the opening essay in his collection Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere.  Aciman's madeleine cake is the smell of his father's lavender shaving lotion, remembered from childhood.  As he grew up, he discovered that lavender shaving lotions and colognes, like good whiskeys,  come in many subtle variations.  He searched for the lavender that best exemplified his own personality, the "ur-lavender," as he calls it.

You're right.  He sounds a bit obsessive.  But then so was Proust.

His contemplation of lavender, like all good obsessions, segues eventually into thoughts of love.  And of loves.  And of death.

And even of chemistry.  Aciman arranges scents mentally by analogy with the chemical elements.

As in Mendeleyev's periodic table, one could sort these scents in rows and categories: by herbs, flowers, fruits, spices, woods.  Or by places.  By people.  By loves.  By the hotels where this or that soap managed to cast an unforgettable scent over this or that great city.  By the films or foods or clothes or concerts we've loved.  By perfumes women wore.  Or even by years, so that I could mark the bottles as my grandmother would when she labeled each jar of marmalade with her neat octogenerian's cursive, noting on each the fruit and the year of its make. 

During lonely years teaching college courses, he expanded his fascination of scents to those of tea -- hanging out at a small Harvard Square café, sampling "each tea, from Darjeeling to Formosa oolong to Lapsang souchong and gunpowder green."

I liked the idea of tea more than the flavors themselves, the way I liked the idea of tobacco more than of smoking, of people more than friendship, of home more than my apartment on Craigie Street.

He finally discovered a lavender perfume, a very expensive lavender, that exceeded his every expectation of lavender, a perfume that evoked "the women in furs who smoked Balkans aboard a yacht while watching the Hellespont drift in the distance."  A scent that reminded him of past experiences and present hopes for his future, all tangled together in what I suppose was the amygdala of his brain.  A tempered joy, bitter regret, and a muddling of past, present and future bring him to ponder:

Perhaps fragrance is the ultimate mask, the mask between me and the world, between me and me, the other me, the shadow I trail and get hints of but cannot know, sensing all along that talk of another me is itself the most insidious mask of all.  But then perhaps fragrance is nothing more than a metaphor for the "no" I brought to everything I saw when I could so easily have said "yes" -- to myself, to my father, to life -- perhaps because I never loved any of the things of the world well enough and hoped to hide this fact from myself by thinking I could do better by looking elsewhere, or because I loved and wanted each fragrance and couldn't determine which to settle for, and therefore stored the very best till a second life rolled in.

Aciman is a fine writer. He combines, painfully, an appreciation of the potential for joy in one's life and a tragic fear of having somehow missed the boat.  Or, rather, perhaps, a sense of there being too many boats, each with a fascinating destination, and the ability to book passage on only one.

I really have no interest in being 13 again, but I love the scent of daphne, because -- like a home movie -- it evokes my past so strongly.  Not just my past experiences, but my emotional reaction as an adolescent to those past experiences.  Why those emotions seem so important and worth recapturing isn't clear to me, but Aciman understands my puzzlement, a perplexity

within each one of us that nothing, not even love or friendship, can unburden, the life we think of each day, and the life not lived, and the life half lived, and the life we wish we'd learn to live while we still have time, and the life we want to rewrite if  only we could, and the life we know remains unwritten and may never be written at all, and the life we hope others may live far better than we have....

Well written, as always, and well felt.  I 've read one of his novels and his memoir (Out of Egypt), and am now reading his essays.  I enjoy his writing.