I don’t think the notion of time travel makes much sense, but I can smell a plate of biscuits and gravy and be back in my grandmother’s kitchen, a leap of 50 years.
Many writers have noticed that some odors seem closely linked to memories. Roy Bedichek put it this way:
Poets speak of the ‘gates of memory.’ If this gate metaphor is apt, then we may expand it, referring to the sense of smell as the surest key with which to unprison and reanimate scenes and forms filmed yesterday or long ago with such fidelity as, now unreeled, to absorb and fascinate, but not completely to deceive the eye of consciousness. I say ‘not completely to deceive,’ for, whenever in recalling the past, consciousness becomes completely curtained off; it is no longer ‘remembering’ but ‘day-dreaming.’
Imagine yourself in a mathematics examination trying to remember a formula. Memory is involved, certainly, but so are your reasoning faculties as you try to deduce what the formula must be. We’re apt to use the word conscious in describing that process. What happens when I smell biscuits and gravy is something else. I think Bedichek is right that it’s more like dreaming.
• Source: Roy Bedichek, The Sense of Smell; London: Michael Joseph, 1960, p. 219.
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