Few monkeys share the hominid line’s ability to grow a good, long beak. Others jut of jaw, sure, project their pates forward, but only homo knows the pleasure of nice, long nose.
It’s not even that we smell so well: women can detect 10,000 scents, men a little fewer. We can’t grasp nearly the olfactory outlook of a dog. But we’ve got a good place to hang our specs, a pointer for sadness or desire, a flag raised in snobbery.
And slobbery they often are, insulted by cold, invaded by renegade bits of RNA. Viruses, when they bug us, replicate nose.
We “nose in,” get “nosy.” The nose, they say, knows. It can ken a fart in a car, is smart to the bounty of bread, keen to the sick-sweet burning of coolant from a dying car.
Love we snuff intimately. The neon musk of a manufactured cologne, the prettified floridity of Chanel or Shalamar, get imprinted on the lungs, strum a straight line to the groin. No substitute, though, for the real funk of sex, the stuff we cover up with deodorizers and powders, deny proffering artificial passions. This too powerful chemical sign drifted across the Aegean, the original siren, tweaking the noses of Greeks.
The apes, of course, have all this too, perhaps without the product placement. But they don’t have the pug or the aquiline, the hooter or the schnoz. They can’t project their personhood before them in the scent-rich wind.