Parenting & Family Quote by Diane Ackerman

Smell is memory’s contraband: it slips past the bouncers of language and logic and hits the brain where we’re least defended. Ackerman, a poet with a naturalist’s eye, isn’t just praising scent as a vivid sense; she’s staking a claim about how identity gets stored and retrieved. “Nothing is more memorable” reads like a dare to a culture that treats memory as a tidy narrative you can caption and share. A smell doesn’t arrive as a story. It arrives as weather.

Her sentence structure mirrors the phenomenon. The triad “unexpected, momentary and fleeting” moves fast, almost evasive, then the line opens into a long, specific tableau: “a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains.” That pivot is the trick. The sensory trigger is small and vanishing; the world it unlocks is expansive and immersive. Subtext: what we call the past isn’t primarily an archive of facts, it’s a stash of bodily impressions waiting to be reactivated.

There’s also a gentle rebuke to our image-dominated era. Photos flatten time into surfaces; scent restores volume. It can resurrect not only what happened but how it felt to be there, including the parts you didn’t know you were recording: sunscreen, pine resin, damp rocks, the cold metallic edge of lake water.

Context matters: Ackerman’s work often treats the senses as intellectual portals, not indulgences. Here, she frames smell as an almost involuntary form of truth-telling, a reminder that our most durable memories are less curated than ambushed.