*
When you say that you had a great time yesterday night at your friend’s dinner party, what you mean (alongside the fact that the company was congenial) is that the wine had an inviting bouquet, the beef fillet was so tender you barely had to chew it and the crispness of the accompanying garlicky green beans provided a delightful counterpoint. The music was the smoky jazz that never fails to lull you into a deep feeling of wholeness, especially when you have imbibed the better part of a bottle of Primitivo di Manduria. By definition, there is nothing you feel that you don’t feel through your senses. And the same goes for wonder.
The limits of our senses are the limits of what we will ever be able to feel, learn, know and do. A person without a nose cannot smell violets, a person with no sense of touch can neither give nor receive massage. Without a tongue, the enjoyment of that Primitivo di Manduria would be beyond us, while without eyes, we could not appreciate the beauty of the Cumbrian fells. For this reason, scientists have been keen to develop tools (the microscope and the telescope, for example) that enhance our senses – to allow us to feel, learn, know and do more. Unfortunately, society as a whole has taken the opposite path, and has done its best to smother our senses and put them to sleep.
For most of our history as Homo sapiens, being attuned to our senses has been a matter of life and death: if you could not smell or otherwise feel the presence of the predator hiding in the bush, it would almost certainly kill you.
Little by little, we have run out of things that could kill us. We have either wiped them out or caged them in but, either way, they are no trouble to us any more. We still need sensory awareness, but not a lot of it. And we have tamed not only other beasts, but also ourselves. We are much cleaner than we have ever been, with hot and cold running water available at the turn of a tap, and cheap, safe, tried and tested products to enhance our personal hygiene, and make us smell less like the apes we are. We know the exact date by which our (pre-packaged, pre-cleaned) food has to be eaten, and we know exactly how to preserve it. When it goes off, we just chuck it in the bin. The wildest culinary risk most of us have probably taken recently is to take an inadvertent sip of some sour milk that we poured on our breakfast muesli. Our senses have become sluggish. By limiting their reach, we have made our lives much smaller: we have made a whole range of sensuous experiences impossible.
Even worse, we appear not to have realized we have done this. When Max Weber, whom we met when looking for our First Key, noted the ‘disenchantment of the world’, he considered it a purely intellectual phenomenon. He did not consider at all the importance of sensual, bodily experience, the possibility that we might have lost wonder because we have dulled our physical capacity to feel it.
He was in good company in this respect. We have spent the last few centuries doing our best to deny that we are first and foremost corporeal beings. Descartes famously wrote that soul and body are two separate entities – and it goes without saying that he considered the soul more important than the body. The body’s only function was to be a receptacle for the soul, a temple and protection for the precious thing contained inside.
This is the prejudice we still live by in practice, even when we don’t subscribe to it in theory. We believe that our body is a machine we controclass="underline" it is not us. Those who believe in an afterlife commonly say that after death souls ‘leave’ the body – they were in and then they’re out. Those who don’t believe have translated the word ‘soul’ into ‘mind’ – or even ‘brain’ – but the idea remains the same. The construct of flesh and bone we drag around the world is but a puppet; the important stuff is going on inside its head. This idea is hurting us profoundly.
We used to live in a sprawling mansion of the senses, with scented gardens, dazzling rainbows and divine music, but then we began to confine ourselves to the inside of the house, and allowed the gardens to decay and the musicians to leave; and we kept on retreating as the walls crumbled and the roof caved in, until, finally, we holed ourselves up in one tiny room, all alone, and let the rest go to hell. Sure, we can travel more easily than we did in the past; and National Trust membership will open the gate to many an immaculate garden. But our scared, numbed senses will be as powerless there as they are in our open-plan office; as unable to participate in the variety and splendour of the world. We cannot buy our way back to our senses.
What we need to do is rebuild the house, restore the garden, hire new musicians and get the fountains back in working order so we can see rainbows again. It takes work. Everything that we have learned so far has been leading to this.
*
Paola and I had just moved to London when we heard a baby scream. It was night and we were walking back home from the station. We stopped in our tracks; the baby kept screaming. We thought of calling the police, though the idea of speaking over the phone was daunting, considering how poor our English was at the time. The scream continued, both heart-rending and frightening; the baby’s distress suggested something more sinister than a bout of colic. Paola took her phone from her pocket (Paola often wears cargo pants, for she has strong views on the lack of pockets in women’s clothes). There were no other sounds, no other voices. Just a baby screaming, and screaming in unearthly fashion.
‘If it’s a baby,’ Paola said, ‘it’s a weird one.’
We began to think that this banshee wailing might not be a baby. We took our phones and googled for things that scream in the London night. We immediately found the answer. The source of the screaming was indeed not human – it was an urban fox. We don’t have foxes in Rome, where Paola and I had lived until a few weeks previously, and there were no foxes in my home town either. We had never heard their shrill nocturnal call before, so we could only interpret the sound as that of a distraught baby.
I thought of sly red foxes adapting to the nooks and crannies of a city, and I felt a rush of wonder; my reality shuddered and grew.
You could say that we misunderstood the sound, only to correct ourselves before we wasted police time, but it would be more correct to say that we actually heard a baby scream. Our bodily experience was the experience you have when you hear a baby scream: we were nervous, on edge and ready to act. When we learned it was a fox, then we heard it as a fox. We adjusted our perception, not just in our ears or our brain, but in our whole body. We were not ready to leap into action any more; we were amused rather than terrified. We – our bodies – reacted in an entirely different way.
Senses are not a transparent window on the world. They are more like impressionable siblings who tell third-hand tales about friends of friends, and tell them so convincingly that we buy them, no questions asked.
The neuroscientist Beau Lotto uses the expression ‘space of possibility’2 to indicate the space created in our brain by all the possible ways in which we can understand the world. I didn’t know that it was possible to hear foxes in a city – a fox was not in my space of possibility – so, when I heard a strange call, I could not think it was emitted by Vulpes vulpes. Our reality is contained within our space of possibility: we cannot conceive anything outside of that space, so what lies outside is, to us, unreal. The space of possibility is the box within which we think. Being in a new city, Paola and I were ready to at least try to think outside the box: we were both willing to let our space of possibility grow. But usually we are only too keen to remain inside it.
Stepping outside of our space of possibility is stressfuclass="underline" when you accept that a fox might lurk in an alley, you start wondering what else might be hiding there, unseen. Our space of possibility is like a muscle: the more we work it, the bigger it becomes. Beau Lotto says that ‘if you give your plastic human brain a dull, unchallenging context, it will adapt to the lack of challenge and let its dull side come out’.3 Inside our box, it is warm and comfortable, but too much warmth and too much comfort will make you ill.