AtDDtA(15): Nasotemporal Transit

[Dave Monroe]

   "'I have smelled something like this before,' pondered Miles, 'yet
... not in this life.  For ... in the way that certain odors can
instantly return us to earlier years ...'
   "'Nasotemporal Transit,' nodded the savvy youth.  'There's a
seminar on that tomorrow, over at Finney Hall.  Or do I mean day
before yesterday?'
   "'Well, sir, this Smegmo concoction here takes me back even further
than childhood, in fact clear on back to a previous life, to before I
was even conceived--'" (AtD, Pt. II, p. 408)


"Nasotemporal Transit"

Cf. ...

And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the
little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because
on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say
good morning to her in her bedroom , my aunt Léonie used to give me,
dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the
little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it;
perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the meantime,
without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks' windows, that
their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its
place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so
long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything
was scattered; the shapes of things, including that of the little
scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious
folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have
lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume
their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past
nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are
broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more
enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain
poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the
ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost
impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of
recollection....

http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/p109g/proust.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Lost_Time

And see as well, e.g., ...

http://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug04/sw.html

http://www.ecu.edu/cs-admin/news/poe/1005/scent.cfm

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/science/08cnd-sleep.html


Finney Hall

Both ...

John Cleland, Fanny Hill (1749)

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/20028

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_Hill

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/c/cleland/john/c624f/

And ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Finney

Mr. Finney first showed an interest in time travel in the short- story
collection "The Third Level," which included stories about a commuter
who discovers a train that runs between New York and the year 1894,
and a man who rebuilds an old car and finds himself transported back
to the 1920's.

[...]

In "The Woodrow Wilson Dime" (1968) Mr. Finney once again explored the
possibilities of time travel. The dime of the title allows the novel's
hero to enter a parallel world in which he achieves fame by composing
the musicals of Oscar Hammerstein and inventing the zipper.

With "Time and Again," Mr. Finney won the kind of critical praise and
attention not normally accorded to genre fiction. Thomas Lask,
reviewing the novel in The New York Times, described it, suggestively,
as "a blend of science fiction, nostalgia, mystery and acid commentary
on supergovernment and its helots." Its hero, Si Morley, is a
frustrated advertising artist who jumps at the chance to take part in
a secret project that promises to change his life. So it does. He
travels back to New York in 1882, moves into the Dakota apartment
building on Central Park West and experiences the fabulous
ordinariness of a bygone age: its trolleys, horse-drawn carriages,
elevated lines, and gaslights. This year Mr. Finney published a sequel
to the novel, "From Time to Tlme."

http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/finney-obit.html

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/f/jack-finney/time-and-again.htm

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/f/jack-finney/from-time-to-time.htm


"takes me back even further than childhood, in fact clear on back to a
previous life, to before I was even conceived--'"

Huh?  Help!


"'T.A.L.P.!'"

Cf. ...

http://www.netlingo.com/emailsh.cfm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_slang_phrases

http://www.stormy.ca/technology/e-mail/email_abbreviations.html


"'Them sure ain't Gibson Girls, I betcha!'" (p. 409)

http://www.gibson-girls.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson_Girl

http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/gibson.htm