Life & Wisdom Quote by Jonathan Carroll

A small, almost slapstick gesture becomes a portrait of modern longing: the little ritual of sniffing the back of your hand as you exit a perfume store. Carroll zeroes in on a behavior so common it’s practically invisible, then makes it strange again. That’s the trick. He’s not describing scent; he’s describing the way consumer culture recruits the body into its own marketing.

The back-of-hand test is intimate and performative at once. It’s private evidence (Does this feel like me?) staged in public (Look, I’m choosing). People walk out branded, not by a label but by a micro-decision they keep re-checking, like a mood they’re trying to stabilize. The line quietly skewers the fantasy that identity can be sampled, spritzed, and confirmed within a few steps of the cash register.

There’s also something communal and lonely in the image. “Everyone” suggests a herd behavior, a synchronized choreography of self-curation. Yet each person is sealed inside their own tiny feedback loop: smell, assess, repeat. It’s a consumer version of prayer beads, or a compulsive reassurance tic, disguised as sophistication.

Carroll, a novelist associated with slipstream and the uncanny, often turns the ordinary into a doorway where reality briefly feels staged. Here, the subtext is that the modern self is always under review. We don’t just buy objects; we buy possibilities, then keep checking our skin to see if they’ve taken.