Read Online A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman - Free Book Online

our time should be named for the world’s greatest desire—Peace.” Many presidents have had roses named after them (Lincoln’s is blood red, John Kennedy’s pure white), and there are wittily named roses to honor movie stars or celebrities (Dolly Parton’s is flamboyantly pungent, with knockout-sized blossoms). Though roses symbolize beauty and love, their colors, textures, shapes, and smells are difficult to describe. “Sutter’s Gold,” one of my favorite hybrid tea roses, produces a flat ruffled flower of yellow petals tinged in apricot, fuchsia, and pink, with a fragrance like sweet wet feathers. The floribundas, thoroughly modern roses, cascade with flowers all summer long. “The Fairy” has hardly any scent, but is a constant explosion of dainty pink flowers from spring until winter, despite light snowfalls. Roses were already considered ancient when the Greek botanist Theophrastus wrote about “the hundred-petaled rose” in 270 B.C. Fossilized wild roses have been dated as far back as forty million years ago. The Egyptian rose was what we now call the cabbage rose,renowned for its many petals. When Cleopatra welcomed Mark Antony to her bedroom, the floor was covered in a foot and a half of such petals. Did they use the floor, and make love in a swamp of soft, fragrant, shimmying petals? Or did they use the bed, as if they were on a raft floating in a scented ocean?
    Cleopatra knew her guest. Few people have been as obsessed with roses as the ancient Romans. Roses were strewn at public ceremonies and banquets; rose water bubbled through the emperor’s fountains and the public baths surged with it; in the public amphitheaters, crowds sat under sun awnings steeped in rose perfume; rose petals were used as pillow stuffings; people wore garlands of roses in their hair; they ate rose pudding; their medicines, love potions, and aphrodisiacs all contained roses. No bacchanalia, the Romans’ official orgy, was complete without an excess of roses. They created a holiday, Rosalia, to formally consummate their passion for the flower. At one banquet, Nero had silver pipes installed under each plate, so that guests could be spritzed with scent between courses. They could admire a ceiling painted to resemble the celestial heavens, which would open up and shower them in a continuous rain of perfume and flowers. At another, he spent the equivalent of $160,000 just on roses—and one of his guests smothered to death under a shower of rose petals.
    Islamic cultures found the rose a more spiritual symbol, one that, according to the thirteenth-century mystic Yunus Emre, is supposed to sigh “Allah, Allah!” each time one smells it. Mohammed, a great devotee of perfume, once said that the excellence of the extract of violets above all other flowers was like his own excellence above all other men. Nonetheless, it was rose water that went into the mortar for his temples. Roses mix unusually well with water, making fine sherbets and pastries, so the flower has become a delicate staple in Islamic cooking as well as being much used to scent apparel. Hospitality still demands that a guest in an Islamic household be sprinkled with rose water as soon as she or he arrives.
    Rosaries originally consisted of 165 dried, carefully rolled-up rose petals (some of which were darkened with lampblack as a preservative)and the rose was the symbol of the Virgin Mary. When the crusaders returned to Europe, their senses sated by the exotic indulgences they discovered among the infidels, they brought attar of roses with them, along with sandalwood, pomander balls, and other rich spices and scents, plus a memory of harem women, sensual and languorous, who awaited a man’s pleasure. The scented oils the knights returned with became instantly fashionable, suggesting all the wicked pleasures of the East, as seductive and irresistible as they were forbidden. Pleasures as sense-bludgeoning as a rose.
THE FALLEN ANGEL
    Smells spur memories, but they