Gaining new eyes from ‘A Natural History of the Senses’

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes." – Marcel Proust

New eyes – like my favorite book gave me.

Wandering into a strange place, brushing against another culture, you are bound to lose your bearings. In this disoriented state, you see the world afresh and even simple things become a feast for the senses. This is why travel is therapeutic for many of us. But cultures shed their mystery and places yield their secrets, and even before then, reality can catch up with us by way of a leaner purse. What a comfort to think of Proust‘s words, that we do not have to move geographically – because the real journey is sensory. And just as you wouldn’t leave for Tibet or Tasmania without your Lonely Planet, this is one trip you shouldn’t take without Diane Acherman’s A Natural History of the Senses.

A Natural History is a beautiful collection of 82 essays that encompass the evolutionary and historical meandering, cultural idiosyncrasies and metaphorical renderings of various sensory phenomena. "The senses don’t just make sense of life in bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern," the poet, professor, pilot and naturalist author of the book reminds us in its introduction. And this is precisely what we are encouraged to do – to deconstruct our sensory experiences and so appreciate the mind-boggling mechanism that orders them perfectly like pieces in a perceptual jigsaw puzzle.

It sounds both daunting and exhilarating. Certainly it would take a hundred lifetimes to run the gamut of what animate beings have seen, heard, touched, smelled and tasted since they began to exist. Here we find the blessing of books: that they can distill for us the essence of human experience, condensing millennia’s worth within so many pages. Perhaps books are the closest thing we will ever come to a time travel machine, the way it wrinkles time and transports us to far-off futures and distant pasts.

One more delightful thing about the travel is the motley cast of characters it throws you together with. So, too, on this journey where we meet a nimble-nosed perfume designer, alongside a mathematician who became anosmic – unable to smell – and thereby lost his remarkable ability to tell the precise ingredients of a dish just by its tastes. We encounter different cultures that touch and kiss, in different ways: some chastely, some extravagantly and still others, savagely. We meet an eccentric Brazilian composer, Heitor Villa-Lobos who would sketch the outline of a chosen vista on his music sheet and make it his melodic line, and Buddhist monks in Thalan, who are recording the sounds of the earth. We are introduced to gustatory daredevils who tempt death by eating the poisonous puffer fish, and cultures that eat meals far stranger – "macabre," Ackerman put it – than balut or asosena. We meet women who lived eight millennia ago, whose beauty accoutrements and vanity rival those of present-day women, and painters who beheld the world in bizarre ways that translated into magnificent masterpieces.

Realizing, through these encounters, that people and cultures perceive the world in their own peculiar ways, we come to terms with the truth of human diversity. It is a lesson in tolerance, too: We sense things indifferently; is it any wonder that we also live and believe differently?

And just when you think we’ve come to the end of our journey, we moor at the harbor of a sixth sense – synesthesia, how "the stimulation of one sense stimulates another." Through this amazing sense which blessed, some would say cursed, few possess, music can be perceived as colors, colors acquire scents and scents take on textures.

The author thinks we were all synesthetes at birth. But as the nurture half of the dichotomy tamed more of nature’s domain, we slowly let slip this most bohemian of our senses. Nor are our other senses spared the braces of social norms. I remember accompanying my seven-year-old niece to a crafts workshop. They were making Christmas tree-shaped brooches and she was about to paint hers a bright blue. I had the impulse to stop her, "Leaves are supposed to be green!" But I catch myself in mid-sentence. Why should we tell children how everything is supposed to look, sound, feel, taste and smell? In that world which children inhabit, things can be whatever you want them to be.

I remember being so sensitive as a child that the thick velvety scent of a bouquet my Dad bought for the Flores de Mayo once made me ill, and the lurid yellow glow of street lamps affected me viscerally. But as I grew up it seemed that my senses, too, were growing jaded. Or is it simply what we have made of our world – a sensory desert from what was once a sensory sea? Why am I no longer greeted by the fresh scent of pine when we drive up to Baguio? Has my sense of smell gone numb or has that lovely scent really gone? Why do I no longer hear mayas serenading me in Manila? Have I forgotten how to listen or have we just filled our world with so much noise to drown out nature’s music?

Sojourning with our senses, we see nature with renewed awe and respect. Feeling ourselves part of it – of this enthralling cosmic dance – we find ourselves craving harmony and serenity.

We dream of changing our world and making it a better place, but if we attempt it without first learning to be more sensitive to our experiences, tolerant and compassionate to other beings, and embracing of nature, we will always end up where we started. Let us begin by giving ourselves new eyes, as Proust counseled us. Perhaps, if we live our lives according to this new vision, there won’t even be anything in our world that needs changing after all.