The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
by David Abram
Vintage Books, New York, New York, 2017 336 pages
Today we participate almost exclusively with other humans and with our own human-made technologies. It is a precarious situation, given our age-old reciprocity with the many-voiced landscape. We still need that which is other than ourselves and our own creations. The simple premise of this book is that we are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human . . . Without the oxygenating breath of the forests, without the clutch of gravity and the tumbled magic of river rapids, we have no distance from our technologies, no way of assessing their limitations, no way to keep ourselves from turning into them. . . Direct sensuous reality, in all its more-than-human mystery, remains the sole solid touchstone for an experiential world . . . only in regular contact with the tangible ground and sky, can we learn how to orient and to navigate in the multiple dimensions that now claim us. (
p. ix)
-- quote submitted by Maura S.
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