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.
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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