The Scent of Time

Paru's Lemon Lychee Black Tea

Every May, I find myself rekindling a long-awaited passion for learning the 5-string banjo and reading Byung Chul Han. With every rebirth of summer, the lasting mental fatigue from the previous semester weighs down on me, but so does the fear of failing to produce. Sometimes I don't know how to feel satisfied with my work until I reach a point of mental exhaustion inflicted by "successful" self-exploitation. I want to unlearn this standard of success measured by my ability to overexert myself, to constantly test my threshold for what I previously thought I could endure. There is a breaking catalyst in the act of giving up, of crushing an expectation for change to be swift. Loss is not determined by the basis of the impossibility of winning, but rather, of failing to recognize a beauty in slowness. Reading Byung Chun Han helps me redefine what the presence, or rather, the passing of time truly represents. Our notions of duty should be governed by a nurtured complacency that rejects hyper-capitalism's need for constant improvement. The world will continue without you, and we mustn't mistake the vertigo of bodies and speech for a need to accelerate. I strongly recommend everyone to read his works, even if it's just short excerpts!

I have already rated the Paru Lemon Lychee tea in a previous post, but I wanted to insert a wonderful tip for my fellow loose-leaf tea enthusiasts: start putting sliced dates in your brew pot! The starchiness of the natural sugar creates a wonderful thickness and appeal to the taste.

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(Excerpt From: Byung-Chul Han. “The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering.”) 

"It seems that scents and tastes reach deep into the past, touch on vast spaces of time. In this way, they form a scaffold holding the earliest memories. A single fragrance resurrects a childhood universe which was believed to have been lost:

A ‘tiny and almost impalpable drop’ of tea covers such an expanse that a ‘vast structure of recollection’ finds room in it. Taste (le goût) and smell (l’odeur) survive the demise of the personage and the decline of objects. They are islands of duration within the current of time that takes everything with it.

A scent is slow. Thus, as a medium, it is not adapted to the age of haste. It was shown that acceleration represents an intuitive solution to the problem of a limited lifetime or the divergence of the time of the world and the time of life in a secular culture. In this context, the maximal enjoyment of worldly opportunities and the optimal actualization of one’s own abilities, and hence the ideal of the fulfilled life, has become the paradigm of a successful life. Whoever lives twice as fast can realize twice as many worldly possibilities and thus, as it were, live two lives in the span of one. Whoever becomes infinitely fast approaches the potentially unlimited horizon of the time of the world (and of worldly possibilities) within one lifetime to the extent that she can realize a plurality of life possibilities in a single earthly lifespan. She therefore no longer needs to fear death, the annihilator of options.

Scents cannot be presented in as fast a sequence as optical images. In contrast to the latter, they can also not be accelerated. A society dominated by scents would probably also not develop any inclinations towards change or acceleration. It would live off its recollections and its memory, off those things that are slow and long-lasting. The age of haste, by contrast, is a ‘cinematographic’ age, one that is to a large extent shaped by the visual. Such an age accelerates the world into a ‘cinematograph film of … things’. Time disintegrates into a mere sequence of present moments. The age of haste is an age without scents. The scent of time is a manifestation of duration. Thus, it escapes ‘activity’ (l’action) and ‘immediate enjoyment’ (la jouissance).”