Unfastidious Sedentation

I was thrilled to come across this passage while reading on the way to work today. It exhibits a shared passion for the unadulterated scents of humanity. Its Masculinity is stolen from Eden, before corrupted even by pachouli and Nag Champa. Within its precedent, pheromones act not as messengers from a future sexual act, but as seeds in one's own guilty conscience.

The temperature began to rise Monday. On Tuesday, the night, the darkness after the hot day, is close, still, oppressive, as soon as Byron enters the house he feels the corners of his nostrils whiten and tauten with the thick smell of the stale, mankept house. And when Hightower approaches, the smell of plump unwashed flesh and unfresh clothing--that odor of unfastidious sedentation, of static overflesh not often enough bathed--is well nigh overpowering. Entering, Byron thinks as he has thought before: 'That is his right. It may not be my way, but it is his way and his right.' And he remembers how once he had seemed to find the answer, as though by inspiration, divination: 'It is the odor of goodness. Of course it would smell bad to us that are bad and sinful.'

- William Faulkner, from Light in August

(pgs. 298-299)