The captivating scent of cakes and the compelling aroma of freshly brewed coffee attract you to a bakery in the morning. A male moth is flittering around, frenetically following the scent plume released by her female. What do these two phenomena have in common? Much more than we suspect, when we look at the molecular level. Imagine if we had a very powerful microscope enabling us to detect details
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As Christmas draws near, and the dark cold evenings become longer, a number of people will have a foreboding about being alone, creating a sense of loneliness. Is loneliness something to anticipate with anxiety? Or even fear? Should we avoid being on our own, and seek out companionship? On the contrary, I will argue that approaching loneliness and giving it focal time can enhance your wellbeing.
Loneliness has many faces. Sociologists distinguish two types: social loneliness, missing relationships with friends and family; and emotional loneliness, the missing of an intimate relationship, like a partner. Anthropologists have also observed other types of loneliness, such as existential loneliness, the feeling of being lost in the world. In practice, social workers and health care professionals tend to view loneliness as a condition, to be countered or cured. Although there are therapies for loneliness as a condition, they seldom are sustaining in the long term. They view loneliness as an aberration that needs to be treated, and not as a transient part of life.
Being alone has its advantages, offering time for reflection on your life, including the people within it, and most poignantly, those people whom you miss. It offers time to take distance and renew oneself, to step aside from the hectic, running pace of daily life and pause, to have time to yourself, time to muse, digest and cherish more deeply the thoughts and memories that surface, and to view your life with a different perspective.
The French novelist Patrick Modiano, the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, has sketched out the beauty of being alone in many of his books. Loneliness is a recurring theme in his oeuvre, where protagonists spend more time in their thoughts and memories than in physical action. His characters wander often alone, approaching their loneliness and longing for other people they have met and with whom they have shared meaningful experiences as balanced parts of life, reflecting and offering positive and negative feelings, not as a condition to be avoided, or feared.
Modiano is often called the heir of the French novelist Marcel Proust, who wrote his magnum opus In Search of Lost Time a century ago. Although the books of Modiano and Proust are very different, they share similarities of theme and attitudes about the appreciation of involuntary memories, which offer their protagonists new insights and perspectives on the situations they are experiencing. These memories are often evoked by the passing impressions of a sound, a visual image, taste, and most of all by scents.
Of all the senses, the sense of smell is the most capable of evoking intense emotional memories. Psychological and neurological studies have shown that memories triggered by scents are more emotional and evocative than those elicited by images or sounds, although there are little differences in the level of detail or vividness of the memories.
The involuntary nature of these scent memories means that they become difficult to control; a scent may pass by you and suddenly intense childhood memories are evoked. In this situation, the best response is to be open, to be aware of your environment and not to close yourself off to the scents that are spinning about the air amid your daily wanderings. The protagonists in the books by Modiano and Proust are often alone or absentminded in a crowd or society when, by chance opportunity, they encounter their best memories.
Besides being involuntary, the scents that evoke special memories are personal and situational, and as they layer and fuse become ‘autobiographical perfumes’, as I have coined them. Everybody can have several autobiographical perfumes that evoke these memories, and for each person, they are different. For one, an autobiographical perfume may be the scent of a special variety of fresh baked cookies, while for another it may be the scents of a church interior. People share common scents as well, especially when they are of the same generation or region and they have encountered the same kind of typical smells in their childhood. Think of the smell of local food, pastry, herbs, and spices; scents attached to familiar landscape and spaces, such as farmland and forest, bars and churches; and each of these experiences enhanced, amplified, and extended by new scents indicative of the holiday season.
And so I present to you the idea of a ‘perfume for loneliness’. This is not a perfume, comprised of chemical or natural extracts, or a medicine as one might expect, against loneliness. It is not a formula that works for all, and is not available to purchase in a shop. It is a perfume for you, personally to discover and create for yourself.
Begin by exploring what kind of scents trigger childhood memories for you. Gather these scents physically, and compose your own personal autobiographical perfume. When you are alone, in a time of reflection, consciously inhale these scents. They will create space to facilitate you to approach and understand your personal feelings of loneliness better. They will evoke special memories that, just like opening a gate, can lead you to deeper reflection on your life, and a richer understanding of the people who are absent and missed. As you inhale, be comforted by this sensory experience, and be at peace with the knowledge that loneliness is not a feeling to avoid or fear.
Headline image credit: Ocean view. CC0 via Pixabay.
The post A perfume for loneliness appeared first on OUPblog.
Writers need to develop deep imagery. It doesn't matter if it's real story or a fictional one; it's the authors' duty to induce reactions from the reader.
Use Imagination—Take a deep breath and read the following paragraph. See if your mind reacts to the stimulus.
It's a hot summer day. You pull a lemon from the fridge. You're holding it in your hand. Look at the outside; run your thumb over it's yellow waxy skin, notice the tiny green bits. Feel how cold it is in your hand. Raise it to your nose and smell it. Mmm. Press it gently and notice the weight of the lemon in the palm of your hand. Pick up a knife and cut it in half. Hear the juices, feel the little spray and notice the smell as it increases. Bite deeply into the lemon and allow the juice to swirl around in your mouth. Did your mouth react?
2 Comments on Use Imagination and Trigger Emotions, last added: 5/2/2010
Ammon Shea recently spent a year of his life reading the OED from start to finish. Over the next few months he will be posting weekly blogs about the insights, gems, and thoughts on language that came from this experience. His book, Reading the OED, will be published by Perigee in July. In the post below Ammon, an expert dictionary reader, reflects on rain.
My girlfriend Alix and I are driving across the country, as people are occasionally wont to do. I know that this particularly American rite of passage is not uncommon but it is one that I have never completed. And so even though we are not in fact driving all the way across I am nonetheless quite excited.
The weather is quite excited as well, and it chooses to make apparent this excitement by raining almost continuously as we’ve driven south and west. I love the rain, and mind its on and off-again exuberance not at all. Each fresh storm that we drive into reminds me of just how sodden English is with its own words for rain.
There are small clutches of largely archaic Scottish words that can describe a different kind of rain, and can be so much more specific than simply relying on drizzle/rain/downpour. There are words such as blirts (’a short dash of rain coming with a gust of wind’), bracks (’a sudden heavy fall of rain’), and driffle (’to rain fitfully…as at the “tail” of a shower’).
There are words for things that have been wet with rain (impluvious), and words that can describe the drip of your clothes when you’ve gotten soaked (platch).
Driving down the highway there is evidence of the rain everywhere, even in those few intervals between showers (also know as hot gleams). The clouds ahead that are dark and ponderous are imbriferous (rain-bringing) and the cars that approach on the other side of the highway and have just passed out of a storm of their own are bedrabbled (made wet or dirty with rain and mud).
There are rain words whose main function is not to describe something, but rather to arouse a vocabularian sense of whimsy, such as hyetal (of or belonging to rain).
I am sure that has hyetal many fine technical uses, but whenever I think of it I simply wonder what sort of things belong to the rain and if the rain ever gets tired of owning them.
My favorite world for rain is the one that comes to mind when we take advantage of a pluvial lull, and stop driving. When we get out of the car the smell of freshly fallen rain rising off the sidewalk and the word that describes this smell inextricably link themselves in my brain–petrichor–and I cannot tell if the word makes me like the smell or the smell makes me like the word or if it matters at all.
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Ok, so, I finally checked out JacketFlap and it's totally eaten my life. Holy Cow. You should check it out too. It'll eat your life as well, but in a good way. Basically, it aggregates all those kidlit blogs out there in one handy place. Holy Cow.
Apparently, Chasing Ray has instigated the first Monday of the month as overlooked book day. I couldn't think of any unblogged overlooked books. It's crunch time with school and my brain, she has stopped working.
So! Instead! I'm blogging about 2 books about an overlooked slice of history, and that is the European Jewish refugee settlement in Shanghai during WWII. Because Shanghai was a free port, you didn't need papers and its doors stayed open long after most of the world stopped accepting Jews trying to escape Hitler. (You did, however, need papers to get out of Europe.)
Ten Green Bottles: The True Story of One Family's Journey from War-torn Austria to the Ghettos of Shanghai by Vivian Jeanette Kaplan is the story of the author's mother's escape from Vienna. Offering stunning portrait of pre-war Vienna, one is struck by how quickly things happened in shutting down Jewish life, and how much of it occurred before Kristelnacht. Once in Shanghai, one is also struck by the sheer poverty of the people--both native and refugee. When you read or think of Shanghai, especially during the 30s and 40s, you have images of swanky nightclubs, Chinese jazz, and communists having secret meetings. (Or, rather, that's what I think of when I think of Shanghai during this time period.)
But the Austrians set up a little Vienna and Nini survives-- even marrying and buying part of a bar. Then the Japanese take control of the city and force all the Jews to the Hongkew ghetto, which they are not allowed to leave. News is scarce and as WWII winds down, rumors of extermination plot are rife. Then, once the war is over and they're free, it's time for the Communist Revolution and once again, the survivors need to find a place to live.
What's most striking about this book is the portrait of Vienna--especially the juxtaposition of Nini's cafe culture and political discussions with her friends and the proper uptightness of the female relatives in her mother's living room.
Nini doesn't interact much with the Chinese people in Shanghai and doesn't speak about them much outside small mentions of her horror at their poverty and the corpses left to rot, or freeze, depending on the season. This is distressing, but understandable as her fight for survival doesn't allow for this interaction. There are also a few minor historical misstatements-- she has Paris falling to the Nazis in May of 1940, when really it was June (ooo! shamless plug for one of my favorite books,
Suite Française).
The book is written in the first person present tense, which at first seems a really odd choice, but works as the story unfolds, and adds an immediacy to the language in the plot as Nini's world crumbles around her in horror. I highly recommend.
A fictional YA-level account of the same time period is
Shanghai Shadows by Lois Ruby. Ilse Shpann is also from Vienna, but the bulk of her story takes place in China, not Austria. Ilse is younger and better-off than Nini and it shows. Nini is almost an adult when she goes to Shanghai--Ilse is, IIRC, twelve. And it shows. Like Esperanza from
Esperanza Rising, Ilse is a brat that really grated on me. And she should be a brat--a girl this age who is used to a high end lifestyle and forced to live a very poor lifestyle is going to throw a fit now and then.
This has a more exciting plot than mere survival. Because of Ilse's age, she's not involved in the day-to-day decisions that her parents have to make to survive. Ilse spends a lot more time exploring Shanghai and gets involved in the resistance. There is also more information about the life led by non-Jewish foreigners.
What this book lacks is a strong sense of place, which
Ten Green Bottles has in spades. Ruby's Shanghai is generically Chinese--you don't get a solid sense of Shanghai (which has a weird architecture) or the time period. I was confused on how her mother was able to study at Cal Berkeley, because for a long time, American universities had quotas on how many Jewish people they could let in, and I was curious on how that would have affected her chances...
One major bone to pick comes with the language. Some background: Standard Mandarin, or
putonghua is based on the Beijing (northern) accent. This involves sticking a lot of "r" sounds on the end of words. Shanghai has its own dialect, Shanghaiese, which is crazy, but counts seperately from Standard Mandarin as one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.
Now, Ilse learns Chinese on the streets from her urchin friend. She would have learned Shanghaiese, so when she utters
Xihu zai nar (Where is West Lake?), I cringe. This is perfect textbook Mandarin.
Nar doesn't exsist outside northern China except in textbooks. Even non-Shanghaiese general Mandarin woudld be
Na li in the South--
Xihu zai na li. Gargh.
But all of a sudden, it is July, here's a rundown on the major events of the month in my world:
July 4: Holiday! No work! Final exam due! no fireworks for me :(
July 6: Amazon's projected delivery date for
Love Is a Many Trousered Thing!
July 11: Final Project/Presention due! Last day of class! Harry Potter Movie!
July 14-15: See Harry Potter movie!
July 16: First day of class!
July 19: Harry Potter party at work
July 21:
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
July 25: Amazon's projected delivery date for
Thursday Next: First Among Sequels!
July 27: GOLDEN BIRTHDAY! (For those not from the MidWest, I'm turning 27)
*phew* And then August involves a trip to Wisonsin, and one to Iowa. State Fair, HERE I COME!
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My mouth puckers every time I look at those lemons.
A lot of people read this and I got some really great comments on facebook about it, but they can't leave a comment on here. Some ladies want to be on that beach. Also I got a variety of answers on what comes to mind when certain words are said.