Jeremy ’s Reviews > Perfume: The Story of a Murderer > Status Update

And soon life had returned completely to normal. People worked hard and slept well and went about their business and behaved decently. The sun shown warmly. Soon it was May. They harvested roses.

There are sense that linger for decades. A cupboard rubbed with musk, a piece of leather drenched with cinnamon oil, a cedar chest: they all possess virtually eternal olfactory life. While other things, floral scents for example evaporate within a few hours, if they are exposed to the air in a pure unbound form.

He sat there and did not yield to his desire, although it was strong. because that desire was an old one of his, to run away and hide in a cave. He knew about that already. What he did not yet know was what it was like to possess something. The very possession and the loss seemed to him more desirable than a prosaic renunciation of both. He had renounced things all his life. But never once has he possessed and lost.

He dared not intoxicate himself with that scent prematurely. He had to throw himself into his work. He had to broaden his knowledge and the techniques of his craft in order to be equipped for the time of harvest.
What Jeremy, is distracting you from this kind of dedication?

Again he closed his eyes. The scents of the garden descended upon him, their contours as precise and clear as the colored bands of a rainbow.

But he was brave. He fought the fear of knowing with a fear of not knowing…

128-129 what would this passage look like set to Music Jeremy wonders

The setting for these debaucheries was the innermost empire where he had buried the husks of every odor encountered since birth.
128-129 description of him reliving situations via the smell he kept in his mental logs and finally drowning them in a grand purifying deluge of distilled water. Like an emotional outburst of chords that finally get resolved this is Jeremy speaking.

And so passes Baldini. Seems everyone that comes into contact with nose guy dies or is ruined somehow.
Baldini: the great hypocrite like us all. Pacts and vows made bringing sound sleep but then opportunity strikes the next day or just not the will to go through with something and back to square one: woe is me.

In learning the system: he could simply sit himself down at the table and write the formula straight out. He had learned to extend the journey from his mental notion of a scent to the finished perfume by way of writing down the formula. The more he mastered the tricks and tools of the trade, the better he was able to express himself in the conventional language of perfume.
This is what you must do in music, JG.