The book is ultimately a sundial-a totem of light and shadow that changes gradually the longer you look at it. On its face, In Sensorium: Notes for My People (Harper) is a lyrical memoir about fragrances, their histories, and the resilience of the American Bangladeshi Muslim novelist and perfumer’s motherland. “And in the act of reading, you are living in past, present, and future with every sentence…and one of the most powerful ways to do that is through a physical book.” “I think to write a book is to really retreat into work that is on its own timescale,” Tanaïs said. We wondered aloud about whether submitting to inherited clocks and calendars (both as readers and writers) is a necessary circumstance of our digital, daily news cycle or if the power of a timeless text is that it is truly evergreen? If it is as relevant yesterday as it is tomorrow, unbound by manmade systems designed to corset the natural rotation of a world organized by seasons and planets in orbit. Tanaïs and I began this conversation meditating on the shelf life of books and how long it can take the public to start engaging with them.
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