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A Natural History of the Senses
Ackerman DianeWhen we describe ourselves as “sentient” beings (from Latin sentire, “to feel,” from Indo-European sent-, “to head for,” “go”; hence to go mentally) we mean that we are conscious. The more literal and encompassing meaning is that we have sense perception. “Are you out of your senses!” someone yells in angry disbelief. The image of someone sprung from her body, roaming the world as a detached yearning, seems impossible. Only ghosts are pictured as literally being out of their senses, and also angels. Freed from their senses is how we prefer to say it, if we mean something positive—the state of transcendental serenity found in an Asiatic religion, for example. It is both our panic and our privilege to be mortal and sense-full. We live on the leash of our senses. Although they enlarge us, they also limit and restrain us, but how beautifully. Love is a beautiful bondage, too.
We need to return to feeling the textures of life. Much of our experience in twentieth-century America is an effort to get away from those textures, to fade into a stark, simple, solemn, puritanical, all-business routine that doesn’t have anything so unseemly as sensuous zest.
“Often funny, often poignant … The synthesis here—Ackerman’s ability to help us see that the sum of our senses is greater than the individual parts, and to do so in language that often resembles a prose poem—is all the more impressive for her finesse in linking science with our loftier aspirations.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
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