A Natural History of the Senses
   Diane Ackerman
  1991 Vintage Books, Random House NY USA
   ISBN: 0679735666


Our senses define the edges of consciousness. How we delight our senses varies greatly from culture to culture, yet the ways in which we use our senses is exactly the same for all of us!

"We take drugs, we go to circuses; we tramp through jungles; we listen to loud music; we purchase exotic fragrances & pay hugely for culinary novelties...What is most amazing is not how our senses span distance or cultures, but how they span time. Our senses connect us intimately to the past, connect us in ways that most of our cherished ideas never could.

"If we were to go to Africa, where the bones of the petite mother of us all, Lucy, lie, just where she fell millennia ago, and look out across the valley, we would recognize in the distance the same mountains she knew. While the constellations have shifted...a little, the landscape and weather have change some, but the outline of that mountain still looks much the same as when she stood there...

"Now leap for a moment to 1940 in Rio de Janeiro, to...the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, whose music, both rigorous and lavish, begins with the tidy forms of European convention and then explodes into the hooting, panting, fidgeting, tinkling sounds of the Amazon rain forest. Villa-Lobos used to compose at the piano in his salon - he would open the windows onto the mountains surrounding Rio, choose a vista for the day, draw the outline of the mountains on his music paper, then use that drawing as his melodic line. Two millions years lie between those two observers in Africa and Brazil - their eyes making sense of the outline of a mountain - and yet the process is identical.

"When we describe ourselves as "sentient" beings, we mean we are conscious. The more literal and encompassing meaning is that we have sense perception....It is both our panic and our privilege to be mortal and sense-full...We live on the leash of our senses...

“We like to think that we are finely evolved creatures, in suit-and-tie or pantyhose-and-chemise, who live many millennia and mental detours away from the cave, but that's not something our bodies are convinced of.”

Ah! What a bouquet is this book. Diane Ackerman has plucked for our consideration & entertainment a posey of senses: smell - touch - taste - hearing - vision - synesthesia. Sections that delight: Of Violets and Neurons; The Inner Climate; Adventures in the Touch Dome; Food and Sex; The Bloom of a Taste Bud; The Hearing Heart; Cathedrals in Sound; How To Watch The Sky; Watching a Night Launch of the Space Shuttle; Courting The Muse.

In A Natural History of The Senses Diane Ackerman takes you on a full-bodied tour around our sensual world to where scents originate & people hone their customs according to their common senses. Her writing is a tapestry rich in textures & tastes, evoking nothing less than a feast for our mind, in & of itself a sensory organ or perhaps Grand Central Station to which all stimuli arrive.

My son gave me this treasure one Winter Solstice & that is the time of year I usually take it down & embark upon another cruise, refreshing my palate. As heady as the scent of elderberries in bloom; the taste of radishes fresh from the earth & the sound of grouse in a spring forest.

Also by Diane Ackerman: The Moon by Whale Light; Jaguar of Sweet Laughter; Reverse Thunder; On Extended Wings; Lady Faustus; Twilight of the Tenderfoot; Wife of Light; The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral and more.
(05/30/99)

Rebecca