'...Feel with Me,

else you will never know.'

Let me start with the last quote I noted down when I was finishing Middlemarch by George Eliot. I have, by the way, seen the BBC screen adaptation of this novel, and my heart wept the entire two episodes I could stomach. Eliot, despite her endless plot twists, delivers romanticism and drama through subtle internal shifts within her characters. These shifts cannot be conveyed without the absolute brilliance of the actors. Needless to say, the acting was less than mediocre, so please avoid watching the Middlemarch adaptation like the plague; invest your time in reading it instead. Like Proust’s novels, it has the capacity to sink under your skin and mix itself into your daily experiences, returning in little flashbacks, like sudden sunbeam glimpses through the foliage or ice crackles in your glass.

My last quote is a testament to what Eliot understood about character development: most of the work is done internally, sometimes as a failure or hesitation to put things into words. The unsaid festers, producing growth as a result of a miraculous internal fermentation within the characters, each of whom functions like a self-enclosed vessel, containing and filtering the unspoken in their own unique way. What remains unsaid between characters requires them to act through leaps of faith, making a jump into the abyss blindfolded, hoping the other will reach out to catch them. Sometimes they are caught, and sometimes they are brutally mutilated. When Celia, the rather unremarkable sister of the main character, Dorothea, asks Dodo to explain how her love came into being, preparing herself for a chat, she asks, “Can’t you tell me?” But Dorothea gently refuses: “No, dear, you would have to feel with me, else you would never know.”

This idea of feeling together, or otherwise not knowing at all, sits uncomfortably in our modern landscape of hyper-visibility, where everything can be explained and made known in a matter of seconds. We are now supposedly well-versed in art history, psychology, and politics, mostly by watching short clips on Instagram or TikTok often generated by AI, and even more often oversimplified or unsupported by research. Consequently, we feel that the idea of genuine expertise or lived experience is no longer all that impressive. The notion that some things can never be truly known unless felt no longer sounds convincing to us; everything must be made digestible.

Do you feel that fragrances also suffer from being “foretold”? Often, they do. If someone tells you what to smell, you will smell it. You will look for that note, and you will find it. Smelling has become predetermined, and that is its own tragedy. Because once it is dictated by what people say about it, it becomes predeterminable, i.e., something that should be easily translated into language. Hence, our modern ban on the abstract and the complex. Try putting those into words. And because the language we use for smelling mostly comes from chemistry or our kitchen pantries, it is little wonder that oversimplified gourmands reign supreme (chemistry is less appealing and way more niche). Just look at all the glorious bananas that swiftly turn into yet another stream of flat vanillas, flooding the market as a “new trend” while bringing nothing new at all.

When Eliot was writing, she was not worried about how difficult it would be to write a film script for a novel where the majority of character growth happens internally. Her characters sit alone, distilling the essence of their own feelings, unreflected by others and without the overt verbalization that we today deem to be our saving grace, much like a secular confession or psychoanalysis. In a society that does not normalize this internal processing, the idea that “you would have to feel with me” to understand me seems as radical as a revolution. In all honesty, smelling should be exactly that: you have to simply smell to understand if a fragrance is worth your while. Yet, we distrust both our feelings and our noses. We read notes and repeat what we are told to smell, I see it all the time in the reviews, which is the sad truth behind why I am constantly selling bits and pieces of my collection. After a good twenty years of smelling with a guide, I am finally learning how to trust my own nose, which is way more radical than it seems, but else I will never know, as Eliot gracefully puts it. And what about you, do you rely on reviews to know or do you venture into the unknown?