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272 pages, Hardcover
First published April 18, 2023
I’d been trying to figure out what was missing from my life, and that unforgettable walk home from the eye doctor revealed the answer: I needed to connect with my five senses. I’d been treating my body like the car my brain was driving around town, but my body wasn’t some vehicle of my soul, to be overlooked when it wasn’t breaking down. My body — through my senses — was my essential connection to the world and to other people.
It was strange to realize that I make the world. In darkness and silence, my brain receives countless messages as my five senses probe my surroundings. In that outer world, there’s no color, no music, no scent until those messages return to my brain — and then the world bursts into life inside my body.
According to Roman statesman and writer Cicero, King Xerxes the Great “offered a prize for the man who could invent a new pleasure.” Inventing a new pleasure seems like an impossible task, yet this explains the extraordinary attraction of YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, and, of course, Facebook. They give us entirely fresh ways to gratify our desire to look at faces. We can view more faces in a single scroll through social media than during a lifetime in a medieval village.
Because our expectations shape our experience, we respond differently to the same scent if we’re in a context that tells us “Parmesan cheese” vs. “vomit,” or “pine tree” vs. “disinfectant cleaner.” Does gasoline smell good or bad? People disagree. What’s the smell of “fresh” — is it pine, flowers, the ocean? Claims that “citrus is cheering” and “ peppermint is energizing” are based purely on learned associations. Americans find the smell of lavender “relaxing ,” but people from Brazil consider it “invigorating.”
Even though I was celebrating my senses as never before, I kept dreaming up new ways to explore them. I knew that by going through my body, I could reach my spirit, and through my spirit, I could reach my body.
This could have easily been: a podcast, a blog post, an article, a TED talk, a pamphlet or a magazine story. I admit to not having read every single word because the cringy writing style made me writhe in discomfort: I couldn't get past the superficiality and triteness of it all, from shallow biological notions of our senses to trivial conversations with her family and friends. Also, what kind of person refers to a playlist as an "Auditory Apothecary"?
Maybe I'm being too harsh and living in New York City can really make a person forget they're a human being bestowed with the basic five senses, but considering the city has a reputation for being a concrete jungle, I'd infer that's not the case. The author must be one of those sheltered types who've never gone hiking in the mountains, swum in lakes or creeks, made barbecue in the wild, slept in a tent in the woods, felt sand caress their limbs, entered Sephora just to breathe in all the fragrances and done countless other little things that make us feel human. Also, not everyone lives in NYC and has so much time on their hands to visit a museum daily. If this book was intended for an audience of people who forgot how to live, then perhaps it's a success, although the author barely scratched the surface of the subject considering the plethora of personal anecdotes and descriptions of the Met, all crammed in a booklet of 200-something pages.
And now a quote from yours truly:
Life is out there, so go out and live it.
END OF RANT