Inevitably, having assumed the insubordination of affect, Professor Ernst-Rudolph Mayer of Princeton University declared, almost without blinking, that the human visage was, beyond all doubt, the face of unfulfilled desire. The silence in the auditorium was deafening. No one, not even the boldest, dared to open his mouth, or even to blink.

The silence duly turned time to stone and embalmed the succession of moments. The words uttered by Professor Ernst-Rudolph Mayer of Princeton University had completely pervaded the place and drilled so deeply into the auditory systems of the audience that the paralysis was total.

But, as events have accustomed us to expect, someone — not the boldest, or the most courageous, or indeed the bravest: no, just someone who could be anyone — moved, almost without realizing it, the wing of his right nostril and sniffed the silence. That small and of course perfectly natural gesture caused an enormous uproar that was the beginning of the end of the hegemony of the thinking about smell. And from that foundational and absolutely revolutionary moment nothing was the same again in the advanced capitalist societies. Obviously, the man who moved, almost without realizing it, the wing of his right nostril and sniffed the silence was sentenced for life to keep his nose in a cage and, as is clearly the rule in such cases, became a leader and subsequently a martyr of the League of Men that Smell Things. And history absolved him… but that’s another story.

Bernardi Roig