A Sauntering this spring among the Field Museum’s meteorite collections, housed in display cases, brought home the problem of being restricted to hearing, sight, smell and taste. How can you know a meteorite when you aren’t allowed to touch it?–-to feel the flow of heat from you to it, to rub its surface irregularities, to compare it to things familiar to touch-–baseballs, cats, books. We have to agree with Margaret Atwood:
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth. To this we add:
(1) As to touch revealing the flow of heat, if you are at a higher temperature than what you touch, that is one feeling of touching it. A different feeling is to touch the same thing when its temperature is higher than yours. Try this experiment: In a cool morning in the mountains, lie on a smooth granite slab; do it again in the warm afternoon.
(2) The senses aren’t five–-hearing, sight, smell, taste, and touch. There is a sixth, and anyone standing before a meteorite in a display case should beg to use it (along with touch). It is heft: to know the piece through lifting it, gauging its weight and resistance to momentum change.
(3) Hugs are nice for touch, but the next time you give a standing hug bend backwards and sense the heft of the one hugged, in a further way telling you about the person.
(Margaret Atwood is quoted from page 256 of
The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood. First Anchor Book Edition, 2001.)
For a brief biography of Margaret Atwood, click
here. For images of or relating to Margaret Atwood, click
here.
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