![]() As an experience, a smell tends to be evanescent an odor that struck you originally as very strong will lose its force within a few minutes and fade into the background. Serious garlic eaters (by the bulb) are generally unaware of the havoc they spread around them. I have heard of a Southeast Asian plant that smells like sewage drains but tastes delicious people build special huts in the woods where they eat it because nobody can stand them during or after their orgy. Some people like Limburger cheese, while disliking the smell. Smell is clearly allied to taste, but the relation is hard to define. ![]() We can talk of an onion smell, of balsam, roses, or skunks, but cannot categorize the odors themselves convincingly. It’s not beyond thought that smell is a vestigial sense, much reduced from what it once was, likely to vanish altogether before long.ĭespite many efforts, it is still impossible to classify or even describe odors more than clumsily our terms for different smells are the names of the objects causing them. But compared with those of the other animals, like blood-hounds to be sure, but also insects such as the emperor moth ( Saturnia pavonia), our keenest noses are gross and pitifully short of range. Different people vary widely in the acuteness of their smell sense, as in the different odors to which they are sensitive. Perhaps it’s true that the more clean-minded we are, the more we are obsessed by nasty ideas, of which fecality and body odors from groin, rump, armpit, and mouth are the most embarrassing. ![]() Most of us do not smell as good, for as much of the time, as we think we should. Kant wouldn’t admit it into his aesthetics, Freud dismissed it as an aspect of anality, for many people it has aspects of bestial sexual behavior summarized in the image of two dogs mutually sniffing. Smell is the pariah among the senses, or has been until now.
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