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03/25/2019
Anarlan
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Anarlan
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79
Hourly time
"Harder days are coming.
The time deferred on revocation
becomes visible on the horizon."
They are two works of the great Jacques Guerlain, which almost force me to deal with temporality:
L´Heure Bleu and Mitsouko. L´Heure Bleu is the crueller of the two, because it lets me feel what time means as it passes. It is completely oriented towards the present, but knows that the clock is ticking.
Mitsouko has overcome the suffering of transience. Mitsouko's done. Brittle and immortally beautiful, lies down on her bitter, mossy bed, a handful of overripe dry apricots in her arms and lets her youth race.
Although physicists and philosophers alike bite their teeth at explaining time, language knows time in all its beautiful and terrible qualities: When time flies by, disappears between the fingers or seems to stand still, language depicts time. Even the greatest of all monstrosities can illustrate it briefly and aptly: That my time would run out one day. Tick-tock.
Already in childhood there were these approaches of introverted, dreamy melancholy when the last rays of sunlight of the day filled with light fell through the kitchen window, while the night drew up on the horizon and the clock on the wall with its relentless tick-tock announced change. The twilight blue-tinted passage of the Heure Bleu, this transition between the past and the future in the making, has always been an hour of bittersweet pausing, of wanting to hold onto the present.
"There's a sweet melancholy that's nothing but a pleasant dream, a lovely melancholy. It is the state of a soul that closes itself off to the vivid temptations that would exhaust it and rather surrenders itself to the illusions of the senses and finds its comfort in thinking about what causes it pain." (Dictionnaire de Trévoux, 1771)
When Jaques Guerlain created L´Heure Bleu, the city of Paris experienced its melancholic blue hour. The world was on the threshold of a radical change, the preparations for a world war were in full swing everywhere in Europe. I see the introverted master in the old photographs in front of me, the snow-white hair strictly styled to the back, white cloaked, more a scientist than an artist, serious. He seems to shy away from the camera, turning his vulnerable gaze away from the viewer. I get a quote from his grandson Jean-Paul Guerlain when he was once asked about the story behind L´Heure Bleu on the Threshold of the First World War:
"Jacques Guerlain once said he had a hunch about the misfortune that was about to happen. "I couldn't put it into words," he told me. "I felt something so intense, I could only express it in a perfume.""
The quote describes the awareness of the transience of the present, which dwells for me in this terribly beautiful fragrance. The top note, aniseed and bergamot, tells the story of the last light summer end of the passing day. Violets, irises and carnations soon immerse the fragrance in a floral, blue-toned sparkle in twilight, so multi-layered, brilliant and melancholic. It surrounds you for a long time before you are released into the night with the comforting velvet warmth of vanilla, benzoin and tonka. It's not so bad. Ticktack.
I have a sample that contains a version of the fragrance that seems to have little to do with the current reformulation because vanilla takes a long time to come and doesn't get too loud either. But it probably doesn't matter to me either to ponder subtleties about reformulations, which L´Heure Bleu passes on the story of the transience of the present from generation to generation, regardless of whether it is transported by shellac or binary codes. L´Heure Bleu tells me to pause in the blue hour as the rupture of the river becomes quieter, taking the present with it, forever driving it away from me as the past, while the future is still in the making.
"Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
The time deferred on revocation
becomes visible on the horizon."
They are two works of the great Jacques Guerlain, which almost force me to deal with temporality:
L´Heure Bleu and Mitsouko. L´Heure Bleu is the crueller of the two, because it lets me feel what time means as it passes. It is completely oriented towards the present, but knows that the clock is ticking.
Mitsouko has overcome the suffering of transience. Mitsouko's done. Brittle and immortally beautiful, lies down on her bitter, mossy bed, a handful of overripe dry apricots in her arms and lets her youth race.
Although physicists and philosophers alike bite their teeth at explaining time, language knows time in all its beautiful and terrible qualities: When time flies by, disappears between the fingers or seems to stand still, language depicts time. Even the greatest of all monstrosities can illustrate it briefly and aptly: That my time would run out one day. Tick-tock.
Already in childhood there were these approaches of introverted, dreamy melancholy when the last rays of sunlight of the day filled with light fell through the kitchen window, while the night drew up on the horizon and the clock on the wall with its relentless tick-tock announced change. The twilight blue-tinted passage of the Heure Bleu, this transition between the past and the future in the making, has always been an hour of bittersweet pausing, of wanting to hold onto the present.
"There's a sweet melancholy that's nothing but a pleasant dream, a lovely melancholy. It is the state of a soul that closes itself off to the vivid temptations that would exhaust it and rather surrenders itself to the illusions of the senses and finds its comfort in thinking about what causes it pain." (Dictionnaire de Trévoux, 1771)
When Jaques Guerlain created L´Heure Bleu, the city of Paris experienced its melancholic blue hour. The world was on the threshold of a radical change, the preparations for a world war were in full swing everywhere in Europe. I see the introverted master in the old photographs in front of me, the snow-white hair strictly styled to the back, white cloaked, more a scientist than an artist, serious. He seems to shy away from the camera, turning his vulnerable gaze away from the viewer. I get a quote from his grandson Jean-Paul Guerlain when he was once asked about the story behind L´Heure Bleu on the Threshold of the First World War:
"Jacques Guerlain once said he had a hunch about the misfortune that was about to happen. "I couldn't put it into words," he told me. "I felt something so intense, I could only express it in a perfume.""
The quote describes the awareness of the transience of the present, which dwells for me in this terribly beautiful fragrance. The top note, aniseed and bergamot, tells the story of the last light summer end of the passing day. Violets, irises and carnations soon immerse the fragrance in a floral, blue-toned sparkle in twilight, so multi-layered, brilliant and melancholic. It surrounds you for a long time before you are released into the night with the comforting velvet warmth of vanilla, benzoin and tonka. It's not so bad. Ticktack.
I have a sample that contains a version of the fragrance that seems to have little to do with the current reformulation because vanilla takes a long time to come and doesn't get too loud either. But it probably doesn't matter to me either to ponder subtleties about reformulations, which L´Heure Bleu passes on the story of the transience of the present from generation to generation, regardless of whether it is transported by shellac or binary codes. L´Heure Bleu tells me to pause in the blue hour as the rupture of the river becomes quieter, taking the present with it, forever driving it away from me as the past, while the future is still in the making.
"Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
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