Ackerman is a poet who reports like a naturalist, and she built this as five long sections, one per sense, with a short final piece on synesthesia. She starts with smell because it is the oldest sense and the one wired straight into memory, then works through touch, taste, hearing, and vision. Inside each she moves freely between the physiology and everything humans have built on top of it: how the nose actually reads a molecule, the perfume trade, the spice routes that redrew maps, why we kiss, what makes a whale’s song carry, the reason chocolate does what it does. She reports much of it firsthand, and the writing is deliberately sensuous, which is the argument.
Our senses define the edge of consciousness, and because we are born explorers and questors after the unknown, we spend a lot of our lives pacing that windswept perimeter: We take drugs; we go to circuses; we tramp through jungles; we listen to loud music; we purchase exotic fragrances; we pay hugely for culinary novelties, and are even willing to risk our lives to sample a new taste.
Introduction, page 14
Most people think of the mind as being located in the head, but the latest findings in physiology suggest that the mind doesn’t really dwell in the brain but travels the whole body on caravans of hormone and enzyme, busily making sense of the compound wonders we catalogue as touch, taste, smell, hearing, vision.
Introduction, page 17
One scent can be unexpected, momentary, and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the Poconos, when wild blueberry bushes teemed with succulent fruit and the opposite sex was as mysterious as space travel; another, hours of passion on a moonlit beach in Florida, while the night-blooming cereus drenched the air with thick curds of perfume and huge sphinx moths visited the cereus in a loud purr of wings; a third, a family dinner of pot roast, noodle pudding, and sweet potatoes, during a myrtle-mad August in a midwestern town, when both of one’s parents were alive.
Chapter 1, page 18