I was very fortunate to have a teacher like this in school. I owe much of my cynicism to his burned-out-hippie, counter-cultural view of life, liberty, and political correctness. He didn't last long in our narrow minded educational system and left to start a head shop. I furthered my education there. 😉
For many people, the smell of a paper book is enchanting. Books can remind us of chocolate, coffee, smoke, wood or vanilla. The aroma is so popular, perfumiers have tried to capture the essence of a book's smell through candles and even cologne or eau de toilette.
Chemistry is essential for understanding why books emit certain scents. The chemicals that produce these scents are called Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). These chemicals become activated with a high vapor pressure at ordinary room temperature. As Bembibre and Strlic explain, the amount of measurable VOCs in materials like historic paper depends on those materials’ rate of degradation. VOCs can be detected in increasing amounts as the materials that produce them begin to degrade. Papers will degrade at varying rates depending on the materials of which they are composed. Different materials will also produce different VOCs. <source>
“I want a soulmate who can sit me down, shut me up, tell me ten things I don’t already know, and make me laugh. I don’t care what you look like, just turn me on. And if you can do that, I will follow you on bloody stumps through the snow. I will do your windows. I will care about your feelings. Just have something in there.”
Poetry comes from the heart. It doesn’t matter if that heart is healthy, broken, damaged, or locked away and hidden by mental despair, poetry speaks to an inner truth. Poetry is happy, sad, inspiring, and hopeless. It is a means of bearing one’s inner soul in a manner that words would otherwise not allow. It’s a cry for help and a proclamation of unbreakable will. Poetry is everything that is ever experienced, summed up the most beautiful package.
Vladimir Mayakovsky, from a letter featured in "Love in the Heart of Everything; The Correspondence between Vladimir Mayakovsky & Lili Brik, 1915-1930,"
Untold centuries ago, when all the world was a desert of wind-whipped, blood-orange sand, and leopards lounged lazily in barren trees and arrogantly ruled all they could see, a few members of the puny race of human beings made their own accommodation with the fearsome beasts. They sacrificed their women to them. And the leopards did not kill the women, but mated with them. From those mists of prehistory, the race they created lives even today: Cat People.
These Cat People have had a hard time of it. They have the physical appearance of ordinary humans, except for something feline around the eyes and a certain spring in their step. They have all the mortal appetites, too, but there are complications when they make love, because in the heat of orgasm they are transformed into savage black leopards and kill their human lovers. They should mate only with their own kind. <Roger Ebert>