Or poking through a house, in closets shut for years,
Full of the scent of time - acrid, musky, dank,
One comes, perhaps, upon a flask of memories
In whose escaping scent a soul returns to life.

- <i> The Flask</i>

When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered...the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls...bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory

Her voice makes perfume when she speaks,
Her breath is music faint and low.

...memory can restore to life everything except smells, although nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

She breathed deeply, and for full ten minutes stood there, like a watered plant drawing up the food of its vitality. The scent was of leaves and turned earth and of rain not far away; the last time she had stood there had been at the end of May, and she had inhaled that scent of summer which is at once a memory and a promise, an aching and a draught of delight...

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived. The odors of fruits waft me to my southern home, to my childhood frolics in the peach orchard. Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief. Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents that start awake sweet memories of summers gone and ripening fields far away.

For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it's a pity we use it so little.

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, on the ruin of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.

I can't throw away cologne because that is Nostalgia in a Bottle, the scent of yesterday, and it reminds me of her more clearly than her picture.

She could smell the pages. She could almost taste the words as they stacked up around her.

Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory.

What would you give to remember everything? I have this power. I absorb your memories; when you hear me, you relive them. A first dance. A wedding. The song that played when you got the big news. No other talent gives your

The music was linked with almost everything I had done, none of the records came without a memory. Everything that had happened in the last five years rose like steam from a cup when I played a record, not in the form of thoughts or reasoning, but as moods, openings, space. Some general, others specific. If my memories were stacked in a heap on the back of my life’s trailer, music was the rope that held them together and kept it, my life, in position.