A series on perfect paperback and perfume pairings.
I carried Minor Detail with me all of last week, only reading pages at a time while waiting in lines for my morning coffee. It wasn’t until the second half that I stayed glued to my seat until the last sentence, finishing 15 minutes before my first meeting of the day. (You’ll understand once you get there, too.) Instinct nearly had me suggesting against reading this book first thing in the morning or before any sort of engagement—but any discomfort is a privilege, to be frank.
We get to close the book. Palestinians don’t.
I hope the ending ignites or relights the fight within you.
Saved
Sentences collected, underscored, and imprinted into memory.
- “And I usually ‘work’ before going to my new job, which will forever be ‘new’ to me, since I don’t know at what point my ‘new job’ should simply become my ‘job.'”
- “Solitude is so forgiving of trespassed borders…”
- “It’s something else, something related more to that inability of mine to identify borders between things, and evaluate situations rationally and logically, which in many cases leads me to see the fly shit on a painting and not the painting itself, as the saying goes. And it is possible, at first glance, to mock this tendency, which could compel someone, after the building next to their office at their new job is bombed, to be more concerned about the dust that was created by the bombing and that landed on their desk than about the killing of the three young men who had barricaded themselves inside, for instance. But despite this, there are some who consider this way of seeing, which is to say, focusing intently on the most minor details, like dust on the desk or fly shit on a painting, as the only way to arrive at the truth and definitive proof of its existence. There are even art historians who make these same claims… According to them, when art forgers imitate a painting, […] they rarely pay attention to little details like earlobes or fingernails or toenails, which is why they ultimately fail to perfectly replicate the painting. Moreover, others claim, based on the same idea, that it is possible to reconstruct something’s appearance, or an incident one has never witnessed, simply by noticing various little details which everyone else finds to be insignificant.”
- “And now don’t see any reason that would prevent me from embarking on my mission to discover the complete truth about the incident, except that, as soon as I sit down behind the steering wheel of the little white car I’ve just rented, and turn the key to start the engine, what appears to be a spider begins spinning its threads around me, tightening them into something like a barrier, impenetrable if only because they’re so fragile. It’s the barrier of fear, fashioned from fear of the barrier. The check-point.”
- “The road is nearly perfectly straight, but even so, I keep glancing at the Israeli map unfurled across the seat next to me, fearing that I may get lost in the folds of a scene which fills me with a great feeling of alienation, seeing all the changes that have befallen it… wherever I look, all the changes constantly reassert the absence of anything Palestinian…”
Scented
The fragrance worn while reading.
Jazmin Saraï Otis & Me, selected largely because of founder and perfumer Dana El Masri’s emphatic support for the Palestinian people. The black pepper blast at the beginning isn’t for the faint of heart but feels oddly apropos for this particular book. Luckily that initial flash settles into a dry, light smoke (no sign of coffee with my skin chemistry, unfortunately) and once it has time to develop, the cardamom-dusted rose warmth emerges. It’s almost as if the perfume has become indistinguishable from skin, transforming into a most intimate incense reserved for immediate closeness. It’s fresh on men, unexpectedly compelling on women.
I have a feeling that allowing my bottle to macerate a bit will bring out even more of the fragrance’s unique facets. I can’t wait.
. . .
xx
Your turn. Thoughts?