The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag

of excess, of overflow, the King is just one item. Since he has only words to tell, then he can explain (the dumbed-down education of the King, the benighted superstitions of the nobles), he can condescend, he can ironize. He can have an opinion (he cannot describe without taking a stand about what he is describing) and that opinion will already have shown itself superior to the facts of the senses, bleached them, muffled their din, deodorized them.
    An odor. A taste. A touch. Impossible to describe.
    *   *   *
    This is a fable the Cavaliere had read in a book by one of those impious French writers he fancied, whose very names made Catherine sigh and grimace. Imagine a park with a beautiful statue of a woman, no, a statue of a beautiful woman, the statue, that is, the woman, clasping a bow and arrows, not naked but as naked (the way the marble tunic clings to her breasts and hips), not Venus but Diana (the arrows belong to her). Beautiful herself, with the headband on her ringlets, she is dead to all beauty. Now, runs the fable, let us imagine someone who is able to bring her to life. We are imagining a Pygmalion who is no artist, he did not create her but only found her in the garden, on her pedestal, a little larger than life-size, and decided to perform an experiment on her: a pedagogue, a scientist, then. Someone else made her, then abandoned her. Now she is his. And he is not infatuated with her. But he has a didactic streak and wants to see her bloom to the best of her ability. (Perhaps afterward he will fall in love with her, probably against his better judgment, and want to make love to her; but that is another fable.) So he proceeds slowly, thoughtfully, in the spirit of experiment. Desire does not urge him on, make him want everything at once.
    What does he do? How does he bring her to life? Very cautiously. He wants her to become conscious, and, holding the rather simple theory that all knowledge comes from the senses, decides to open her sensorium. Slowly, slowly. He will give her, to begin with, just one of the senses. And which does he pick? Not sight, noblest of the senses, not hearing—well, no need to run through the whole list, short as it is. Let’s hasten to relate that he first awards her, perhaps ungenerously, the most primitive sense, that of smell. (Perhaps he does not want to be seen, at least not yet.) And it should be added that, for the experiment to work, we must suppose this divine creature to have some inner existence or responsiveness beneath the impermeable surface; but this is just a hypothesis, albeit a necessary one. Nothing so far can be inferred about this inner aliveness. The goddess, beauty incarnate, does not move.
    So now the goddess of the hunt can smell. Her ovoid, slightly protruding marble eyes under her heavy brows do not see, her slightly parted lips and delicate tongue do not taste, her satiny marble skin would not feel your skin or mine, her lovely shell-like ears do not hear, but her chiseled nostrils receive all odors, near and far. She smells the sycamores and poplar trees, resinous, acrid, she can smell the tiny shit of worms, she smells the polish on soldiers’ boots, and roasted chestnuts, and bacon burning, she can smell the wisteria and heliotrope and lemon trees, she can smell the rank odor of deer and wild boar fleeing the royal hounds and the three thousand beaters in the King’s employ, the effusions of a couple copulating in the nearby bushes, the sweet smell of the freshly cut lawn, the smoke from the chimneys of the palace, from far away the fat King on the privy, she can even smell the rain-lashed erosion of the marble of which she is made, the odor of death (though she knows nothing of death).
    There are odors she does not smell, because she is in a garden—or because she is in the past. She is spared city smells, like those of the slops and swill thrown from windows onto the street during the night. And the little cars