Love and Reverence In Quiet Times of Crisis

I went to a museum of smells the other day. It was precisely what you’d expect from a museum of smells: wild and weird, somewhat beautiful. It turned out to be less a museum of smells than a museum of perfumes and their essences, a history lesson of the particular way in which European people have attempted to capture and categorize the essence of the earth, extract it, draw pictures of it, obsess over it, sorted, classify and, specify it, place it in beautiful bottles, charge money for it, build an industry around it, mechanize the industry around it into something…