Grammar of a scent.(odors in everyday life)

SMELL is the uncultivated sense. We have lost the sensitivity of dogs and sharks, and we do not improve the little that we retain. Sight, hearing, and taste have all been disciplined by the arts, and you may sample the results in concert halls, museums, and restaurants, but although there are such things as perfumes and gardens, smell mostly shambles along by itself. In summer, it comes into its own, even for humans, even in the man-made city. Heat and humidity call up New York's smells like the sorcerer's apprentice.

Despite the second stanza of "Song of Myself"--"Houses and rooms are full of perfumes"--Walt Whitman didn't write a lot about smells; the great sensualist was an eye and ear man. Have we discovered Whitman's inner prig? Or did he just leave town in August, like a shrink? No homebound Gothamite can afford to be as chaste in his perceptions as Whitman was.

Demolition and construction sites have an unmistakable smell: damp and slightly sweet. You associate it with cloven halves of old buildings, showing the ghosts of staircases, like tattoos on their stripped walls; or with scaffold-covered detours, wet with run-off, where some new building is going up. It is not the smell of dirt or rock. I suspect it is old cement, powdering away, or new cement freshly poured. If so, then the Romans smelled it when they put up the Pantheon.

Construction sites smash the past and build the future. In the present we have transportation, and the smell of exhaust. What pedestrian has not crossed a street just close enough to a turning bus to get the full facial blast? Bus exhaust smells like cigarettes, only dustier. If Mayor Bloomberg really cared about our health, he would ban these beasts. On some summer evenings, when the sky settles down like a lid, and the setting sun is the color of a scab, the whole city becomes a bus's backwash, and our only consolation is to know that our ancestors had it worse, for their omnibuses were pulled by horses.

Our natural impulse is to hide our mistakes. Where smells are concerned, that means air freshener. Air freshener smells like a wad of bubblegum, if it were the size of a softball. The great users of these sweet stinkbombs are cabbies. Some of their devices, dangling from the rear-view mirror or the Plexiglas partition, are shaped, with cruel cheeriness, like pine trees, so you'll think you're in the Adirondacks. Once one of these has been hanging in a car, its work is done, and it does no good to ask the cabbie to take it down. Your only recourse it to roll down the windows and hope the cabbie drives fast, though that leaves you prey to buses.

Smell is closely related to its more respectable cousin, taste. Restaurants and markets produce some of the city's best smells, offering a palette edited for human pleasure. The Brazilian restaurant has a stand for mixed non-alcoholic drinks by its front door. The menu ...