I was insistently attempting to smell something in Messe de Minuit that I wouldn’t recognize anyway ….I’ve never been to midnight mass in my life. Once I realized this, but also that I was able to appreciate it any, way, I was able to connect it to something that I am quite well acquainted with: its subtly sour, musty scent reminded me of a shadowed corner of a used bookshop; towering piles of moldering books stacked on sagging rotted wood shelves….a corner that hasn’t seen sunlight in years, books that are touched by human hands rarely, if at all. All of this. Now it is a scent that makes sense to me.
I was insistently attempting to smell something in Messe de Minuit that I wouldn’t recognize anyway ….I’ve never been to midnight mass in my life. Once I realized this, but also that I was able to appreciate it any, way, I was able to connect it to something that I am quite well acquainted with: its subtly sour, musty scent reminded me of a shadowed corner of a used bookshop; towering piles of moldering books stacked on sagging rotted wood shelves….a corner that hasn’t seen sunlight in years, books that are touched by human hands rarely, if at all. All of this. Now it is a scent that makes sense to me.