Minor Theories of Daily Life

An Ongoing Investigation into Why I Am Like This

I am writing this because I am trying to take my own daily life seriously. In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke says that no experience is too slight, that even the smallest occurrence unfolds like fate, each moment a thread in a vast fabric held together by an infinitely tender hand. If that is true, then it feels necessary to examine the ordinary.

Rilke also insists that art must arise out of necessity, and that we should flee general subjects in favor of our own sadnesses, desires, memories - whatever is closest to us. So I am writing this not because it is extraordinary, but because it is mine. Because perhaps understanding the smallest threads is the only way to understand the pattern at all.

What follows is an attempt at looking closer. At taking something as ordinary as the smell of freshly washed sheets and treating it not as trivia, but as a thread: one that, when pulled, reveals how memory, attachment, repetition, and belonging quietly structure the “fabric of a life”.

Last night, before going to sleep, I put on freshly washed bedsheets. I had used a detergent I hadn’t bought in over a year. The moment I lay down, certain memories began appearing in my head, completely unannounced. I realized the last time I had used that specific detergent was during the period when we used to spend entire weekends in my apartment. The scent was so deeply associated with that person that it felt almost territorial. It took me three hours to fall asleep. I felt very, to say the least, uneasy.

The first thing I did when I woke up was strip the bed and wash the sheets again — this time with a completely new detergent. 

Later, I consciously tried to remember specific things about that person, funny enough, I couldn’t recall the exact sound of his voice. I couldn’t fully visualize his face. I couldn’t even remember how he smelled. He never wore perfume.

Strangely, the first gift I ever gave him was a bottle of perfume.

Perfume is a cliché gift — almost embarrassingly so. But it is also one of the most revealing. To give someone a fragrance is to declare, without negotiation: this is how I perceive you. It is an act of projection disguised as generosity. You are not just giving an object; you are assigning an “aura”. You are deciding how this person will enter rooms, how they will linger after leaving, how they will be remembered by others.

It is oddly authoritarian. And deeply intimate.

Perhaps I was trying to solidify him — to give him an outline that would last beyond touch, beyond voice, beyond time. To make him traceable.

As it turns out, scent is the most concrete form of memory we have. And yet the only smell that remained was not his, but the detergent.

A similar thing happened last week. I tried a random perfume and spent the entire day unsettled by it — certain it reminded me of someone, but unable to identify who. The recognition came without context. The feeling arrived, but the person did not.

It seems that with smell, memory does not always return as a narrative. Sometimes it returns as a mood looking for its owner.

Eventually, I remembered. It belonged to someone I see almost every day. The delay was what surprised me. Perhaps scent has its own hierarchy — it preserves what was once ritual, what was once repeated, what was once paid attention to.

Then I began thinking about the scents that matter to me — the ones I can almost smell when I think of a person or a place.

There is a specific perfume I bought the day I landed in Athens. Every time I wear it, the memories return more vividly than photographs ever could.

There is my mother’s perfume — always full of roses. That scent alone is enough to make me feel at home.

And that brought me to another realization. Since moving out of my house in Istanbul, I have been buying rose soaps, rose room sprays, rose-scented candles. I told myself it was simply a preference. But now I believe that it was something more deliberate.

Perhaps I was trying to manufacture a sense of home — to recreate, through repetition, the atmosphere that once surrounded me without effort.

If scent anchors memory, then maybe it also anchors belonging. And maybe what we call “home” is nothing more than a smell we have decided not to let go of.

I am aware that this is not a groundbreaking realization. We all know, in some way, that the smell of sunscreen can transport us instantly to summer.

There is nothing new or original about scent carrying memory. What feels particular, though, is how selectively it operates. Not every smell survives. Not every person becomes attached to one. Some vanish entirely. Others settle into the background of our lives and refuse to leave.

Maybe what remains is not intensity, but repetition. What we encounter again and again becomes embedded. What was once routine becomes permanent. Well, I am not sure. 

And so maybe scent does not only record emotion: it records some sort of habit. It remembers where we lived, who we stood next to, what surrounded us long enough to become ordinary.

Proust famously wrote about a madeleine unlocking an entire childhood, and decades later psychologists like Tulving and Thomson argued that memory resurfaces most vividly when the conditions of its original encoding are reinstated. A scent encountered again does not simply remind us of something; it reconstructs the atmosphere in which it once existed. Smell does not retrieve narrative in order — it retrieves context. The body recognizes before the mind explains. And sometimes recognition is enough to destabilize an entire evening.

*It is important to note that I could not remember his voice, his exact face, or his smell, yet I remembered the brand of detergent. There is probably some sort of a metaphor in there about emotional priorities. But, well, I am choosing not to unpack it at this time. I am already occupied with new mischiefs, which make this entire episode academically archival. And no! This is not about the person my friends are currently texting each other about. They consistently (also rightfully) misidentify the source of my literary behavior.