Читать книгу Aromatics and the Soul: A Study of Smells онлайн

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Like all other nerve-reactions, this particular reflex can be educated: either up or down. It can be blunted and degraded, or it can be rendered more acute, more prompt to react. Now, one of the effects of civilised life, of town life, is to abbreviate the period of all reflex action. And if this applies to knee-jerks and to seeing jokes, it is even more noticeable in the particular reflex we are here considering.

A citizen of Cologne in Coleridge’s days, for example, must have been anosmic to most of the seven-and-twenty stenches that offended the Englishman, and in my own time I have counted as many as ten objectionable public perfumes, yea! even in Lucerne, the “Lovely Lucerne” of the railway posters. Several of these, perhaps, did not amount to more than a mere whiff, just the suspicion of a something unpleasant, no more (but no less) disturbing than, say, one note a semitone flat in a major chord; two or three of them, however, to the sensitive, thin-winged organ of an English school-ma’am, would have attained to the rank of a “smell,” a word on her lips as emphatic as an oath on yours or mine; four of them, at the least, were plain stenches, and so beyond her vocabulary altogether; and one was—well! beyond even mine, but only too eloquent itself of something ugly and bloated, some mess becoming aerial just round the corner. I did not turn that corner.