The sense of smell is often noted for its emotional significance, its ability to trigger emotional states and memory cascades. It's a secret passage into the mind, a direct path to the primitive lizard brain nestled beneath the civilized finery of the well clothed sophisticated mind.

But it is also a weak sensory path for humans, orders of magnitude less acute than for most other animals, and often dismissed as having little importance. There is some difference by gender, the feminine being more attuned to odors if not truly more talented in detecting and distinguishing them. There is art as well as talent involved. Those who lose another input path, such as vision, often discover that there is much useful information in odor.

It is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It isn't an absolute value about which all can agree though there is usually great overlap in judgements. Ugliness seems nearly if not equally as diverse. Beautiful and ugly aromas vary with the judge. For example: [via Cronaca]

A few weeks ago, I was reading a portion of Genesis Rabba (Parasha 34) with some HUC grad students, and we came across a story that begins: "Two women were coming out of Tiberias, and one said to the other: Blessed is He who brought us out of this bad air!"

The story is told to demonstrate how parochial the two women are, for Tiberias was a noted resort and famous city. But it seems likely that, for someone who lived in the country, ancient cities had a definite bad odor. In one of his letters, Seneca writes:

I expect you're keen to hear what effect it had on my health, this decision of mine to leave (Rome). No sooner had I left behind the oppressive atmosphere of the city and that reek of smoking cookers which pour out, along with a cloud of ashes, all the poisonous fumes they've accumulated in their interiors whenever they're started up, than I noticed the change in my condition at once....

It is still so. I seldom go to cities, seldom get within 30 miles of a city, in part because they smell so bad. The chemical tang of urban air sets off alarms deep in my mind causing anxiety, an urge to flee to a healthier place. Even the little town 10 miles away with a population of only a thousand and no building over two stories tall smells bad in that way, though not oppressively. When the wind blows from the west, as it often does at dusk, the bad breath of cities tens of miles away wrinkles the nose.

I've travelled, been in every great American city and many of the lesser cities at every point of the compass. From Toronto to Mexico City and L.A to New York I've tasted the air. They are each unique but much alike. They all stink.

You get used to it and stop noticing after a while. The stink gets mentally filtered, useless noise that masks more interesting odors.

The smell in the market at noon. Meat fat dripping on a hot surface, the faint aroma of cheeses, somewhere the aroma of warm corn tortillas, a drift of cut herbs and roasting vegetables, chickens with rosemary on a rotisserie. That’s the distilled ambrosia of human civilization for me: the buildings, the art, the busy or happy, sad or lost crowds wandering the streets, that’s something but it’s not what matters most to me. It’s what people cook and brew when they come together that matters most.

You can filter the chemical miasma - the stale urine and petrochemical signature odor of civilization - and become comfortable. The anxiety can be borne, then ignored, and in the end so completely overcome that the stench is deniable. You can even come to prefer it. "What's that I smell / Do I smell home cookin'? / It's only the river / Only the River"