Open a drawer you haven't touched in twenty years and find a
bottle of perfume. Spray it. What happens next is not nostalgia.
Nostalgia is warm. It aches pleasantly. It knows it's looking
backward. What this does is different — it collapses the
distance. For a few seconds the earlier time doesn't feel
remembered. It feels reinstated. The room, the light, the
particular quality of a morning reassemble themselves around
you with an authority that has nothing to do with conscious
recall.
This is because scent bypasses the thalamus entirely. Every
other sense — vision, hearing, touch — routes through that
relay station before reaching the cortex. Smell doesn't. It
travels from the olfactory bulb directly to the amygdala and
hippocampus — emotion and memory, two synapses from the nose.
Rachel Herz's neuroimaging work
at Brown confirmed what Proust described in 1913: odour-evoked
memories are not more accurate than other memories. They are
more emotionally immersive. The affect arrives before the
content. You feel the past before you can name it.
Freud had a word for this kind of return. He called it the
Unheimlich — the uncanny. His
1919 essay
rejected the idea that uncanniness comes from encountering the
unknown. The opposite. It comes from re-encountering the known
— something familiar that was hidden and has now resurfaced.
Schelling's definition, which Freud adopted: "Everything is
unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but
has come to light."
A sealed bottle fits this structure precisely. The fragrance
existed quietly, materially intact, while the world shifted
and your identity accumulated decades of alteration. When
re-encountered, it produces a rupture in temporal continuity.
Not because the scent has changed — it hasn't. Because you
have.
Though even this isn't quite right. The fragrance has changed
too — oxidised, its top notes degraded, the composition
shifted by decades of slow chemistry. But its rate of change
is so much slower than yours that it produces an illusion of
permanence. The bottle seems to promise fixity. You cannot
reciprocate. Human identity is processual, not static — you
were never meant to remain identical to the person who closed
that drawer. The discomfort is that the object seems to have
managed what you could not.
This is where it diverges from hauntology. Mark Fisher's
framework mourns lost futures — the feeling that the present
has failed to deliver what the past once promised. That's a
cultural displacement, a collective grief. What happens with a
rediscovered fragrance is more personal and more disturbing.
The object appears stable, almost indifferent to the years.
You, by contrast, have aged, shifted, rebuilt. The bottle
seems to have remained outside history while you were inside
it. That imbalance creates a subtle ontological disturbance —
the sense that time has behaved unevenly.
I've
written before
about objects that outlive the worlds that made sense of them.
But this is narrower. This isn't about cultural context
vanishing. It's about temporal suspension — the discovery that
something of your own past survived unchanged in a drawer
while you moved through years that changed you entirely. The
eeriness isn't that the world has moved on. It's that the
bottle didn't.
What sharpens this further is the sense that earlier
versions of yourself are gone. Not just aged past — gone.
That person, with his specific hopes, naivety, emotional
intensity, blind spots, cannot be re-entered. You can
remember him. You cannot inhabit him again. This is a
common fear, though people rarely articulate it directly.
It is not simply ageing that unsettles. It is
irretrievability.
An old fragrance intensifies this because scent does
something memory alone cannot: it reconstructs atmosphere.
For a moment, the emotional climate of that earlier self
flickers back into the room. Then it fades. The contrast
between temporary reactivation and permanent loss sharpens
the awareness that identity is not cumulative in a simple
way. It is layered, and layers become inaccessible.
Though it is not accurate to say those versions are gone
in an absolute sense. They are no longer active
configurations of your nervous system, but they are
structurally embedded in who you are now. Every preference,
fear, aesthetic sensibility you carry is downstream from
those earlier states. The younger self is not erased — he
is metabolised. You no longer have access to the raw form,
but his architecture persists.
The distress arises because memory gives you a partial
reconstruction, not full embodiment. That gap feels like
standing outside a locked room that once was your whole
world. And if the feeling carries intensity beyond
momentary unease — if it feels existential rather than
reflective — it may be tied less to memory and more to
mortality awareness. The two are closely linked.
There is another way to read the encounter. The bottle is
static matter. You are adaptive consciousness. Identity is
not a sequence of discarded selves — it is a continuous
biological process that updates while retaining traces. The
earlier version feels lost because you cannot be him again.
But the fact that you can recognise him at all means he is
still structurally present. The fact that you have changed
— aged, accumulated, rebuilt — is not loss alone. It is
evidence of having lived.
But that knowledge doesn't dissolve the feeling. Something
intimate has persisted without your permission, and its
persistence exposes, quietly and without malice, the fact
that you are not the person it remembers.
Sources:
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