I mentioned David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous in an earlier post, written when I was about halfway through the book. I still recommend it, even though Abram goes off the rails a bit in the last half. The problem is that he’s looking for “the Big Ah-Hah”—the singular insight that explains everything that counts. How did we in the West become so cut off from the natural world? Abram concludes, all too neatly, that it’s because the West embraced the alphabet, thus giving up the nature-infused language of oral culture for a vitiated “alphabetic civilization”: Today the speaking…Read More