The devil is in the detail, or so they say... And “they”—whoever they may be—are always right!
As a writer I know only too well that nothing brings a story to life like a precise and telling little detail. When teaching writing at the University of Cambridge, I urged my students to keep their eyes open for seemingly unimportant little things—be it a persistent Alpine flower bursting through the rock, or a barely visible mark on a person’s face. Yes, small details can be particularly revealing when describing someone’s appearance.
Once in Moldavia (as Moldova was called during my first, Soviet, life) I went on a tour of the world’s biggest wine cellars at Mileștii Mici, which store nearly two million bottles in 200km-long tunnels. My escort in that underground city, which had streets, lanes and crossroads so wide that lorries could drive freely along them in both directions, was a local winemaker. He had a clearly visible scar, left by the rim of a wine glass, on the bridge of his nose. This was the result of years of daily (and often hourly) wine-tasting! That little scar was so evocative that I was later able to describe a character in one of my novels as “a man, with a professional wine-taster’s corn on his nose.” One precise little detail can be worth pages of lengthy description.
The fact that the corn was on the winemaker’s nose, and not, say, on his cheek or jaw, made the scar hard to overlook. It also underlined the fact that the nose was any winemaker’s most outstanding (in more than one sense) feature.
And it is not only winemakers who have noses of importance.
Here’s how Simon Garfield describes the snout of Andrew Bell, an 18th-century Scottish printer, in his book All the Knowledge in the World: “His wasn’t an averagely large nose, or even a very large nose. His was a nose that won rosettes, and you could pin the rosette on his nose and he’d hardly notice, such was its pocked and fleshy expanse. It was the size of an avocado. It made the proboscis monkey look like Audrey Hepburn. When people met him they found it impossible to look away, such was its implausibility.”
Let’s face it (again, in more than one sense): noses are not at all insignificant. They can grow into literary protagonists, like in the short story The Nose by Nikolai Gogol, in which collegiate assessor Kovalyov wakes up one morning to discover that his nose has left his face. Horrified, he goes looking for his missing body part and finds it parading along St Petersburg’s main drag, Nevsky Prospect, wearing the clothes of a high-ranking bureaucrat! And the peculiar nose of Cyrano de Bergerac from the eponymous play by Edmond Rostand has been widely regarded as a symbol of insecurity and self-doubt.
Noses can also get prominent enough to become Hollywood stars, like, say, the one belonging to the great American actor Adrien Brody. And as suggested in Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio, the nose can also be used in lieu of a lie detector...
As I said already, the nose remains the wine-tasters’ main working tool, and wines, incidentally, have ‘noses’ too. Although when someone asks, “How’s the nose on that wine?” they are not referring to a physical nose, but rather to the aromas and smells that the drink produces.
In Moldova, they told me about one celebrated local taster who, allegedly, never tasted the wines (he probably wanted to avoid developing a corn on his nose), for he could describe their exact qualities just by smell and colour. Once, his colleagues decided to play a joke on him and, in the middle of a tasting, gave him an unmarked test-tube with urine. The old taster looked at it and said, “I think it’s urine.” Then—for the first time ever—he sipped from the tube and joyfully concluded, “It is urine indeed!”
Noses feature in countless proverbs, sayings, idioms and other folk wisdoms. My favourite is an African proverb which goes: “Never mind if your nose is ugly, as long as you can breathe.” That probably means that general health is more important than appearance...
According to a wide-spread delusion, human noses (as well as ears) never stop growing. That is why older people’s lugs often look longer than their younger counter(body)parts. Modern science, however, does not support that point of view, asserting that noses and ears do not really change with age but that their cartilage can soften and droop, making them appear bigger than they actually are.
Wait a second... Why did I decide to write about noses out of all things? Not sure. Perhaps, beleaguered for days by an aggressive seasonal hayfever, I am simply being led by my constantly running nose? Yes, the nose is the only body part that can actually “run” without moving.
Where is my poor nose running to? To London? To Georgia, whose nationals are famous for their beautiful aquiline beaks? Or, possibly, to Moldova, with its age-long wine-sniffing traditions?
Who nose?
