英语书籍：The Scent Trail（1）ZT
=====TODAY'S BOOK=====================
THE SCENT TRAIL
How One Woman's Quest For The Perfect
Perfume Took Her Around The World
by Celia Lyttelton (nonfiction)
Published by New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
ISBN: 9780451226242
Copyright (c) 2007 Celia Lyttleton
SCENT (Part 1 of 5)
======================================
英语书籍：The Scent Trail简介
For a woman with a passion for scent, having a signature
perfume created just for her is the ultimate luxury. And
it turns into the ultimate odyssey. Armed with a list of
ingredients--inspired by her favorite moods and memories--
Celia Lyttelton embarks on a journey around the globe
to track down each component of her scent, tracing its
origins, history, literary references, and culture.
From the rose-growing region of Isparta, Turkey, and
the lavender fields of Grasse, France, to the vetivert
distilleries in India and the ambergris shores in Socotra,
the "Island of Bliss," Lyttelton takes us on a magical
journey, giving us an insider's account of the history
of perfume and revealing the sights, sounds, and aromas
"she" experiences, as well as introducing us to the
extraordinary people she meets.
**************
INTRODUCTION
Scent has great power, its development charts the spread of
civilizations, the beginnings of science and medicine, the movement
of faiths and the links between the ancient, classical, medieval and
modern worlds.
And because scent evokes memories--at one time or another we have
all experienced those sudden unexpected moments when a trace of
scent instantly reminds us of an incident from childhood, or a
forgotten landscape, or the presence of a long-lost lover--we
tirelessly search for the right one. The personal associations that
are bound up with scents are wonderfully vivid for every one of us;
there are certain scents and certain smells that lead to instant
recall, often with hallucinatory clarity.
According to Proust, each hour of our lives is stored away in a
smell and in a taste, and when those smells or tastes are
reexperienced memories are triggered. The more prosaic reason that
the connection between smell and memory is so strong is that the
olfactory nerves transport information to the brain's limbic system
'and' to its cortex. The limbic system is the primitive part of the
brain where our memories are formed, our emotions and moods are
regulated and our sense of smell is lodged. The cortex is the
complex part of the brain that has to do with conscious thought.
The sense of smell also has the power to suppress the rational
critical left brain and to stimulate the creative, dreamy right
brain, so it evokes memories with more emotional force than any
other sense. I am convinced that we wear scent not just to make us
feel more attractive, but because it unlocks the emotions associated
with memories that come flooding back when we smell the scent of the
lipstick our mother wore or the fragrance of the woodsmoke from the
fire in the cottage where we spent an idyllic weekend.
Sight and sound are physical senses, but smell and taste are
chemical: when you breathe in the smell of a pine forest, or your
mother's skin, you are taking molecules right inside your body, and
that makes smell a very intimate sense. Kipling wrote, "Scents are
surer than sounds or sights to make your heartstrings crack."
From birth to death our eyesight and other senses deteriorate, but
our sense of smell never weakens because the cells regenerate every
twenty-four days. We don't use this sense enough; the nose is
capable of recognizing some 500,000 different odors, and although,
consciously, the brain might not register them all, once you've
smelled something for the first time, the next time you encounter
that particular smell you can immediately identify it.
In my case smells transport me, literally. The buttery smell of iris
takes me straight to the hills of Tuscany where I spent most of my
childhood. I used to watch the iris roots being harvested in the
summer and I saw them laid out to dry on straw mats in the sun.
Jasmine takes me to the plains of Rajasthan, and the smell of
vetivert, an aromatic grass from India, reminds me of a green Tuscan
lake where I used to swim. Lavender and heather, or oak moss, remind
me of autumnal leaves and fungi and ground me in the Yorkshire
moors, where I have a cottage, and when I smell basil I am instantly
reminded of the warmth of the sun and the sparkling seas that
surround the Aegean islands, where I have spent several summers and
where I swam for hours in the sea, breathing in the ozone-and-
seaweed-scented air.
It isn't surprising that scents so often take me to places: I have
been lucky enough to travel a great deal. I traveled as a child with
my archaeologist mother, Margaret Lyttelton, and I have not stopped
traveling since. My earliest scent memories are of my grandparents'
house, where I often went to stay. It was full of the smells of
woodsmoke from the fires, cigars, leather, dark chocolate and my
grandmother's rich peppery and rose scent (which she had made in
Cairo during the war and the formula of which she kept so that she
could have it copied in Paris).
In 1982, when my mother was researching a book on the spice trade
routes, I traveled with her to Yemen, which, in the 1980s, was a
wild and lawless place. We trekked deep into the interior, where the
groves of frankincense and myrrh flourished, but we found that they
were guarded by tribesmen armed with Kalashnikov rifles. We were
ambushed and the Land Rover that the British embassy had lent us,
and the maps we'd been using, were seized. We had to return, alone,
across the deserted black lava fields until, eventually, we came
across some friendly Bedouin who escorted us to safety.
Once we'd recovered from our ordeal we set about exploring the
labyrinthine souks of Sana--the capital of Yemen--through which a
blind man could have found his way simply by following his nose. The
pungent atmosphere of the spice bazaar, the acrid smell of the qat
market (a leaf narcotic which the Yemenis chew), the perfumers'
balmy-smelling street and the fragrant smoke from the burning gum
resins of frankincense and myrrh wafting down the alleyways--those
memories remain with me to this day and are the driving force behind
this book. I wanted to revisit those places and particularly those
smells, and above all I wanted to unlock their secrets.
I wanted to discover what the fundamental ingredients of scent were
and how they were grown and harvested. I wanted to know how a scent
was made, from the first glimmer of an idea to the final product.
And I decided that the best way to do that would be to ask a bespoke
perfumer to make a scent for me from a recipe that combined my own
favorite smells: things like nutmeg, Indian zambac--a heady and
carnal Indian jasmine--vetivert and iris roots, and then to travel
to the countries where those ingredients were indigenous.
(continued on Tuesday)
=====TODAY'S BOOK=====================
THE SCENT TRAIL
How One Woman's Quest For The Perfect
Perfume Took Her Around The World
by Celia Lyttelton (nonfiction)
Published by New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
ISBN: 9780451226242
Copyright (c) 2007 Celia Lyttleton
SCENT (Part 1 of 5)
======================================
英语书籍：The Scent Trail简介
For a woman with a passion for scent, having a signature
perfume created just for her is the ultimate luxury. And
it turns into the ultimate odyssey. Armed with a list of
ingredients--inspired by her favorite moods and memories--
Celia Lyttelton embarks on a journey around the globe
to track down each component of her scent, tracing its
origins, history, literary references, and culture.
From the rose-growing region of Isparta, Turkey, and
the lavender fields of Grasse, France, to the vetivert
distilleries in India and the ambergris shores in Socotra,
the "Island of Bliss," Lyttelton takes us on a magical
journey, giving us an insider's account of the history
of perfume and revealing the sights, sounds, and aromas
"she" experiences, as well as introducing us to the
extraordinary people she meets.
**************
INTRODUCTION
Scent has great power, its development charts the spread of
civilizations, the beginnings of science and medicine, the movement
of faiths and the links between the ancient, classical, medieval and
modern worlds.
And because scent evokes memories--at one time or another we have
all experienced those sudden unexpected moments when a trace of
scent instantly reminds us of an incident from childhood, or a
forgotten landscape, or the presence of a long-lost lover--we
tirelessly search for the right one. The personal associations that
are bound up with scents are wonderfully vivid for every one of us;
there are certain scents and certain smells that lead to instant
recall, often with hallucinatory clarity.
According to Proust, each hour of our lives is stored away in a
smell and in a taste, and when those smells or tastes are
reexperienced memories are triggered. The more prosaic reason that
the connection between smell and memory is so strong is that the
olfactory nerves transport information to the brain's limbic system
'and' to its cortex. The limbic system is the primitive part of the
brain where our memories are formed, our emotions and moods are
regulated and our sense of smell is lodged. The cortex is the
complex part of the brain that has to do with conscious thought.
The sense of smell also has the power to suppress the rational
critical left brain and to stimulate the creative, dreamy right
brain, so it evokes memories with more emotional force than any
other sense. I am convinced that we wear scent not just to make us
feel more attractive, but because it unlocks the emotions associated
with memories that come flooding back when we smell the scent of the
lipstick our mother wore or the fragrance of the woodsmoke from the
fire in the cottage where we spent an idyllic weekend.
Sight and sound are physical senses, but smell and taste are
chemical: when you breathe in the smell of a pine forest, or your
mother's skin, you are taking molecules right inside your body, and
that makes smell a very intimate sense. Kipling wrote, "Scents are
surer than sounds or sights to make your heartstrings crack."
From birth to death our eyesight and other senses deteriorate, but
our sense of smell never weakens because the cells regenerate every
twenty-four days. We don't use this sense enough; the nose is
capable of recognizing some 500,000 different odors, and although,
consciously, the brain might not register them all, once you've
smelled something for the first time, the next time you encounter
that particular smell you can immediately identify it.
In my case smells transport me, literally. The buttery smell of iris
takes me straight to the hills of Tuscany where I spent most of my
childhood. I used to watch the iris roots being harvested in the
summer and I saw them laid out to dry on straw mats in the sun.
Jasmine takes me to the plains of Rajasthan, and the smell of
vetivert, an aromatic grass from India, reminds me of a green Tuscan
lake where I used to swim. Lavender and heather, or oak moss, remind
me of autumnal leaves and fungi and ground me in the Yorkshire
moors, where I have a cottage, and when I smell basil I am instantly
reminded of the warmth of the sun and the sparkling seas that
surround the Aegean islands, where I have spent several summers and
where I swam for hours in the sea, breathing in the ozone-and-
seaweed-scented air.
It isn't surprising that scents so often take me to places: I have
been lucky enough to travel a great deal. I traveled as a child with
my archaeologist mother, Margaret Lyttelton, and I have not stopped
traveling since. My earliest scent memories are of my grandparents'
house, where I often went to stay. It was full of the smells of
woodsmoke from the fires, cigars, leather, dark chocolate and my
grandmother's rich peppery and rose scent (which she had made in
Cairo during the war and the formula of which she kept so that she
could have it copied in Paris).
In 1982, when my mother was researching a book on the spice trade
routes, I traveled with her to Yemen, which, in the 1980s, was a
wild and lawless place. We trekked deep into the interior, where the
groves of frankincense and myrrh flourished, but we found that they
were guarded by tribesmen armed with Kalashnikov rifles. We were
ambushed and the Land Rover that the British embassy had lent us,
and the maps we'd been using, were seized. We had to return, alone,
across the deserted black lava fields until, eventually, we came
across some friendly Bedouin who escorted us to safety.
Once we'd recovered from our ordeal we set about exploring the
labyrinthine souks of Sana--the capital of Yemen--through which a
blind man could have found his way simply by following his nose. The
pungent atmosphere of the spice bazaar, the acrid smell of the qat
market (a leaf narcotic which the Yemenis chew), the perfumers'
balmy-smelling street and the fragrant smoke from the burning gum
resins of frankincense and myrrh wafting down the alleyways--those
memories remain with me to this day and are the driving force behind
this book. I wanted to revisit those places and particularly those
smells, and above all I wanted to unlock their secrets.
I wanted to discover what the fundamental ingredients of scent were
and how they were grown and harvested. I wanted to know how a scent
was made, from the first glimmer of an idea to the final product.
And I decided that the best way to do that would be to ask a bespoke
perfumer to make a scent for me from a recipe that combined my own
favorite smells: things like nutmeg, Indian zambac--a heady and
carnal Indian jasmine--vetivert and iris roots, and then to travel
to the countries where those ingredients were indigenous.
(continued on Tuesday)
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