6 September: Boreham on Life's Fragrance

The Fragrances of Life
We are living in an aromatic world and are entitled to make the most of it. The planet is, quite literally, a box of perfumes. No woman derives more gratification from the shapely little phials upon her dainty toilet table than the most prosaic mortal derives, consciously or unconsciously, from the pleasant scents that, along the ordinary avenues of common life assail his nostrils. Smells, properly understood, are signals and semaphores, and their code is worth mastering. By means of their enticing fragrance, the flowers signal to the bees. The bees respond to the call, gather the waiting hoard of honey, distribute the pollen and thus perpetuate the species. Insects and birds are wise enough to apprehend the subtle significances and mystic meanings of the odours wafted to them from every garden plot and leafy pleasaunce.

Generally speaking, the alluring scents of life are invitations to healthy, invigorating pleasures. In his classical description of the gamekeeper and his cottage, Richard Jefferies lays great stress upon this point. After dilating fondly on the wholesome smells within the cottage itself, he goes into raptures over the smells of the woods. The odour of the bark "that goes right down your throat and preserves your lungs as the tan preserves leather;" the smell of the earth, freshly upturned by the ploughs; and "the scent of hedges and grass which, after a shower, is as sweet as honey." The opposite is also true. Any greybeard who casts his memory back across the years can recall practices in relation to garbage, carrion, and all kinds of refuse against which the most poisonous effluvia cried to heaven in protest. And, knowing what we know today of microbes and bacteria, we shudder at the thought of the serious perils against which those unsavoury but beneficent odours were designed by Nature to warn us.

Association Of Scents With Scenes
It would be passing strange if Australians, of all people on the face of the earth, failed to detect the mystical significance of powerful perfumes. For nowhere on the earth's broad surface is there anything as fragrant as the Australian bush. What camper among the great silent valleys has failed to notice it? To find, on waking, nothing but God's blue sky above you, save, perhaps, for a lingering star and a green tracery of interlacing boughs! Lazily to stretch your limbs on your impromptu couch of fern and scrub, as perfectly refreshed by four hours of sleep as one has often been by twice that quantity! To lie listening to the full-throated matin song of the kookaburra, the shrike-thrush, the butcher-bird, the yellow robin, the blue wren, the wattle-bird, and the magpie as they call to one another from the leafy choir stalls of the forest primeval! And then, as the crown and the climax of this daybreak felicity, to inhale the champagne air of the grim and rugged ranges, perfumed by all the spices of musk, dogwood, sassafras, hazel, varnish-wattle, bush-lavender and eucalypt! The man to whom there comes such an ecstatic experience, watches the gentle crimsoning of the grey snafts of light that, like triumphant plumes, adorn the eastern sky, and feels, as he inflates his lungs with the bracing and tonic air, that the lines have fallen to him in pleasant places.

Let any man draw up a list of the places that he has most enjoyed visiting, and of the pleasures that represent life's choicest experiences, and he will discover with surprise that many of them owe their attractiveness to the delicious perfumes of one kind or another, with which they stand associated. It may be the aroma of coffee or of cigars or of animal life or of old books or of any one of a thousand things; but some of the purest felicities of life are the joys of smelling. Indeed, it is scarcely too much to say that the smell of a thing is the soul of that thing. The sight of it may excite our curiosity; the sound of it may arouse our interest; but the smell of it, in some subtle, mysterious and elusive fashion of its own, avoids all formal avenues of approach, takes complete possession of all the chambers of the mind, and inextricably identifies itself, for all time to come, with the thought of the thing to which it essentially belongs.

The Lure Of Life's Intangibilities
Scientists maintain that the sense of smell is the brain's most intimate confidant. Frank Buckland, the eminent naturalist, called it the brain's nearest neighbour. In advising deer-stalkers, he urges them to keep out of sight of their quarry; but, he says, it is better for the animal to see you than to hear you; and it is better for it both to see you and to hear you than to smell you. The sense of smell, Buckland argues, is in much more direct connection with the brain of the deer than is the sense of hearing or the sense of sight. This seems to suggest that the creatures of the wild have been more swift to read the invisible and inaudible code of fragrant and malodorous signals than have their companions of a loftier and lordlier creation.

Nothing haunts the memory like a smell. The appearance of a thing becomes distorted in the mind, and whilst sounds become uncertain and obscure, odours remain remarkably vivid. The most miserable days of Dickens' boyhood were spent at Covent Garden. In the days of his prosperity, he often came within sight of the place, and even heard the old familiar sounds connected with its traffic; but he could not bear to go near enough to inhale the smell of it all. To the end of his life, the smell of decayed cabbage leaves, or any odour that revived the memory of his early wretchedness, sent a shudder through his logical influence of scents and smells and explains to some extent the phraseology to which the sacred writers so often resort. They repeatedly imply that the important thing is, not that a man's religion should look well, or sound well, but that it should possess the subtle quality of fragrance, just as this complex old world of ours is in reality a box of perfumes, so its most potent influences are diffused by the indefinable, inexplicable aroma of noble, beautiful, and gracious lives.

F W Boreham

Image: Eucalyptus Trees: an Australian Box of Perfume