Song Zhiwen

Osmanthus from the Moon, Fragrance Beyond Clouds

In later centuries, Mid-Autumn poetry kept returning to this bridge between sky and heart—Su Shi’s “Shui diao ge tou” (1076) pairs lunar radiance with mortal separation. Modern science adds a quiet confirmation: the “Proust phenomenon,” noted by Marcel Proust (1913) and explored by Rachel Herz (2004), shows how smell uniquely unlocks memory. Song’s intuition that scent outruns sight thus feels prescient. Taken together, myth, craft, devotion, and cognition converge: osmanthus falls from an imagined moon so that, in one breath, the distant becomes near. [...]