Wonderful.

Outside on the rue de I’Odeon I was disgusted with myself for having complained about things. I was doing  what I did of my own free will and I was doing it  stupidly. I should have bought a large piece of bread  and eaten it instead of skipping a meal. I could taste the  brown lovely crust. But it is dry in your mouth without  something to drink. You God-damn complainer. You dirty phony saint and mart}^’, I said to myself. You quit journalism of your own accord. You have credit and  Sylvia would have loaned you money. She has, plenty of  times. Sure. And then the next thing you would be  compromising on something else. Hunger is healthy and the pictures do look better when you are hungry.  

Eating is wonderful too and do you know where you're going to eat right now? 

Lipp's is where you are going to eat, and drink too. 

It was a quick walk to Lipp's and every place I  passed that my stomach noticed as quickly as my eyes or my nose made the walk an added pleasure. There were few people in the brasserie and when I sat down  on the bench against the wall with the mirror in back and a table in front and the waiter asked if I wanted beer I asked for a distingue, the big glass mug that held a litre, and for potato salad. 

The beer was very cold and wonderful to drink. The pommes à l'huile were firm and marinated and the olive oil delicious. I ground black pepper over the potatoes and moistened the bread in the olive oil. After the first heavy draught of beer I drank and ate very slowly. 

When pommes à l'huile were gone I ordered another serving and a cervelas. This was a sausage like a heavy, wide frankfurter split in two and covered with a special mustard sauce. 

I mopped up all the oil and all of the sauce with bread and drank the beer slowly until it began to lose its coldness and then I finished it and ordered a demi and watched it drawn. It seemed colder than the distingui and I drank half of it. 

Ernest Hemingway, from A Moveable Feast

Sight.

von Kalckreuth, The North Sea, 1955

The WORLD is TOO MUCH WITH US

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

William Wordsworth

Revives.

Steve points to the importance of sense memory ...

I fear the effects of the loss of sensory experiences of reality that bind us to our own lives and to the lives of other people. Imagine the children of climate-change-obsessed parents, one of whom refuses to fly to other places, the other of whom shuns eating anything more sensually evocative than seaweed. What palpable constituent of the world will bring these kids back to the song of themselves as they go through life? What intimate tangible quality of their lives will they carry with them and cherish? The ancient Egyptians perfumed their mummies and buried them with sweet-smelling jars of fruit and beeswax, no doubt so that, if the dead had the good fortune to make their way into the afterlife, familiar smells would keep their personalities as intact as their bodies.

You could gather them with a thousand other women, blindfold me, and I could find (both) my grandmas just by the scent of the perfume in their hair.  Their kitchens also had unique aromas.  The Welsh signaled a welcome with richly-buttered toasts, cinnamon-sugar, and teas; the German, a bass line of hams, sausages, sauerkraut, and, seemingly always, the cookies -- singing the bright soprano of anise and powdered sugar.  Bit-O-Honey everywhere -- in dishes, in golf bags, in sweater and "windbreaker" pockets.

Pipe smoke from both grandpas and an uncle. Dunhill Navy, Prince Albert, and Borkum Riff Whiskey.

Pine trees, freshwater lakes, and two-cycle outboard exhaust.  The sound of a plastic tackle box placed in the bottom of an aluminum jon boat.  The halyard gently tapping the flagpole in the background.

My Dad's wooden shoeshine kit.

Charcoal blazing in a Weber, the creak of lawn chairs unfolding, and listening to the Tigers' game on WJR, ("The Great Voice of The Great Lakes"), all with the lasting taste of a "sip" of beer in my nine year-old mouth (it's never tasted as good).

The pop of pine burning in a fire pit.

Birdsong.

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

Vladimir Nabokov

Education.

Wyeth, Jamie, Island Roses, 2004

We cannot create observers by saying 'observe', but by giving them the power and the means for this observation and these means are procured through education of the senses. 

Maria Montessori

Thank you, Casey.

Finer.

Miracles seem to me to rest not so much upon power coming suddenly near us from afar but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that, for a moment, our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there around us always.

Willa Cather

Senses.

We cannot create observers by saying "observe," but by giving them the power and the means for this observation and these means are procured through education of the senses.

Maria Montessori

Sensed.

[Ted] Williams used a postal scale in the clubhouse to make sure humidity had not increased the weight of his bats. An official of the Louisville Slugger company once challenged Williams to pick the one bat among six that weighed half an ounce more than the other five. He did. He once sent back to the factory a shipment of bats because he sensed that the handles were too thick. They were, by .005 of an inch. 

CONNECT

Do you smell that?