Life begins somewhere with the scent of lavender. My father is standing in front of a mirror. He has just showered and shaved and is about to put on a suit. I watch him tighten the knot of his necktie, flip down his shirt collar, and button it up. Suddenly, there it is, as always: lavender.
Remembrances. That's what this book is all about. Beautiful crumbs written by someone who looks into childhood, scents, travels, language, books, artists, writers and the mundane and brings out a collection of fragrant memories written in master care and style. Proustian, if I must say.
" The search for ideal lavender was like the search for that part of me that needed nothing more than a fragrance to emerge from the sleep of thousands. I searched for it the way I searched for my personal color, or for a brand of cigarettes, or for my favorite composer.
And yet, even as I criticized each fragrance, I found myself growing attached to it, as though something that had less to do with the fragrances themselves than with that part of me that had sought them out and been seduced by them and finally blossomed because of them should never be allowed to perish. Sometimes the history of provisional attachments means more to us than the attachment themselves, the way the history of a love affair stirs more love than the affair itself. Sometimes it is in blind ritual and not in faith that we encounter the sacred, the way it is habit not character that makes us who we are. Sometimes the clothes and scents we wear have more of us in them than we do ourselves."
from Lavender
" I learned to read and to love books much as I learned to know and to love Rome: not only by intuiting undisclosed passageways everywhere but also by seeing more of me in books than there probably was, because everything I read seemed more in me already than on the pages themselves. I knew that my way of reading books might be aberrant, just as I knew that figuring my way around Rome as I did would shock the fussiest of tourists.
I was after something intimate and I learned to spot it in the first alley, in the first verse of a poem, on the first glance of a stranger. Great books, like great cities, always let us find things we think are only in us and couldn't possibly belong elsewhere but that turned out to be the broadcast everywhere we look. Great artists are those who give us what we think was already ours. Never mind that we've never seen, felt, or loved through anything remotely similar. The artist converts us; he steals and refashions our past, and like songs from our adolescence, gives us the picture of our youth as we wished it to be back then - never as it really was. He gives us our secret wishfilm back.
Suddenly, the insights nursed by strangers belong, against all odds, to us as well. We know what an author desires, what he resembles; we even know why. The better a writer, the he erases his footprints -- yet the better the writer, the more he wants to intuit and put back those parts he chose to hide. With the right hunch, you could read the inflection of an author's soul on a single comma, in one sentence, and from that one sentence seize the whole book, his life work. "
earmarked from Intimacy
" Indeed, the disconnect, the hiatus, the tiny synapse -- call it once again the spread between us and time, between who we are and wish we might have been -- is all we have to understand our place in life. Once measures time not in units of experience but in increments of hope and anticipated regret."
from Temporizing
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