NOSTOS, where Achilles is more beautiful than Ulysses.
Nostos in Greek means the return -- that which is eternally impossible, which
speaks to the heart and to the imagination ; the return within the confounded
space and time where hope remains.
Nostos is the fundamental root of the poignant feeling called nostalgia, the
pain of nostos.
Here, perfume is the vehicle of the return to which one aspires in vain. Like
an intense and deep incense that would have burned for three thousand years,
the perfume celebrates the Homeric epic of that most beautiful of heroes, whose
anger and its unpredictable consequences made the Trojan War.
The totemic figure of the desired but unfulfilled nostos is Achilles. This is
not the nostos of Ulysses and his Odyssey; here, it is Achilles, the emblem of
the perfume, conceived by the gods, born of love, like the Trojan war.
Achilles is a complex hero with a double essence: divine through his mother,
the goddess Thetis, human through his father, Peleus. He carries within him the
beauty of duality, sometimes a fearsome warrior with powerful and penetrating
musks – the extreme virility of the Oud without which Troy cannot be defeated –
and sometimes the femininity of the rose.
Achilles is the violence and beauty found in the extraordinary diversity of
humanity.
