Sense

&
Sensibility
Reporter

Velasco, Eddie T.
 Chapter
Sense and Sensibility
Outline
◈ Helen Keller
◈ Smell is a Fallen Angel
◈ The Elusive Person-odor
 Smell fills in the gaps of certain life experiences,
allowing for compensation of hegemonically induced words.
Helen Keller
First deaf-blind to earn a bachelor or arts degree
She is an American author, political activist,
lecturer, and innovator.
She was a prolific writer and speaker.
A member of the Socialist Party of America and the
Industrial Workers of the World.
An advocate of women’s suffrage, labor rights,
socialism, and antimilitarism.
Helen Keller and The World
Keller is an innovator who happens to be blind, illuminates in “Sense and Sensibility” on the
sense of smell as an operational sense- and sensibility-making mechanism
in one’s own life and navigating and knowing the world.

Smell is heightened especially with sight abilities, allowing for a contrary

circumspection of things like smell itself.
Smell allows for navigation of the world (Ex. Keller)
Smell allows people to have their fill of experiences maimed in one’s own historical life.
Smell fills in the gaps of certain life experiences.
Smell is capable of liberating aspects of the self, community, nation, and the world.
Smell stages a contrary event of being able to experience the newness of things or the
oldness of historically deprived things.
 Smell is a Fallen Angel
“For some inexplicable reason the sense of smell does
not hold the high position it deserves among its sisters.
There is something of the fallen angel about it.”

“In my experience smell is important and I find that

there is high authority for the nobility of the sense
which we have neglected and disparaged.”

“I doubt if there is any sensation arising from sight more

delightful than the odors of scents which swells,
subsides, rises again wave on wave, filling the wide
world with invisible sweetness.”
The Elusive Person-odor
“From exhalations I learn much about people.
I often know the work they are engaged in”
“It is difficult to put into words the thing itself, the
elusive person-odor. There seems to be no adequate
vocabulary of smells, and I must fall back on
approximate phrase and metaphor.”
“Some people have a vague, unsubstantial odor that
floats about, mocking every effort to identify it.”
“Masculine exhalations are as a rule stronger, more
vivid, more widely differentiated than those of women.”
 “In the odor of young men, there is something
elemental, as of fire, storm and salt sea. It
pulsates with buoyancy and desire. It suggests all
things strong and beautiful and joyous and gives
me a sense of physical happiness.“

“I wonder if others observe that all infants have

the same scent --- pure, simple, undecipherable
as their dormant personality. It is not until the age
of six or seven that they begin to have perceptible
individual odors.”
Thank You!