Originally published 12 June 1995
Somehow, I’m always late getting around to reading the really delicious books.
Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses has been lying on the floor by my bed on and off for four years, exuding a luscious transsensual enticement, begging to be read. I resisted, knowing that like rich chocolate or creamy cheesecake, Ackerman’s prose was a treat I would appreciate the more for having resisted.
This is a book so engorged with delicacies that it must be read in courses, perhaps with a bit of plainer language in between to clear the palate, a bursting cornucopia of science and poetry that left me exhausted by its exuberance.
Perception, writes Ackerman, is a form of grace. In Catholic theology, one must be disposed to grace to receive it; Ackerman is clearly well disposed. Smell, taste, touch, hearing, and vision: these are the five windows to her world, thrown open, uncurtained, in all weathers.
“Life showers over everything,” she writes, “radiant, gushing.”
Each of us has a premier sense, a window larger than the others. For me it is vision. Not larger in physical size (the tactile organ, the skin, is a thousand times more expansive than the retinas of the eyes), but larger in the excitements evoked by faint stimulus. Acute sensation is not a mere numbering of receptor cells; it is an electrical and chemical pandemonium in the brain, out of which the brain somehow constructs that most remarkable of things, a self.
Which brings up another book I have recently read, less welcoming than Ackerman’s award-winning volume but as interesting in its own way: Marcel Minnaert’s Light and Color in the Outdoors.
Minnaert (1893 – 1970) was a Dutch astronomer who reveled in the magic of vision. His book first appeared in English in 1940; a new translation was prepared in 1993 to commemorate the centennial of the author’s birth. It is a compendium of tricks of light and color in the natural world. For each luminous effect the author gives a scientific explanation.
Until I read Minnaert, I had thought of myself as something of a connoisseur of light and color. I had trained my color vision on the almost imperceptible hues of stars. I had witnessed a dozen kinds of rainbows. Glories, sun dogs, the zodiacal light, mirages, moon bows, noctilucent clouds — I had seen them all. But Minnaert catalogs a feast of lights such as I hardly knew existed.
A few years ago, I watched a thousand annular eclipses of the sun projected onto the pavement under a tree by a thousand pinhole gaps among the leaves. It was an astonishing spectacle. Eclipses scattered like bright coins for the picking. This is Minnaert’s phenomenon No. 1, for which he provides a satisfying geometrical discussion, and lists the better trees under which to seek these solar riches.
I have looked a hundred times with binoculars at the double star in the handle of the Big Dipper, but never noticed a curious oscillating effect described by Minnaert, which occurs as the binoculars are moved, as if the fainter of the two stars were attached to the brighter by a rubber band. This phenomenon, it turns out, provides a way to observe the time it takes for light to stimulate the retina of the eye, something we generally assume to be instantaneous.
Once, in Alaska, I witnessed a beautiful circumzenithal arc, a kind of wrong-way “rainbow” caused by flat ice crystals floating in the upper atmosphere. I counted it as a once-in-a-lifetime thrill. Minnaert describes more than a dozen kinds of solar arcs and bows, usually seen in ones or twos, but occasionally all together in a spectacular, sky-filling display.
Minnaert treats the colors of sea, sky, lakes, waterfalls, and puddles along the road. And treats they are: graces, revelations, great gusts of visual beauty blowing in the windows of the brain.
Ackerman says of vision: “To taste or touch your enemy or your food, you have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes.”
Minnaert’s book is a many-busheled silo of information, gathered by a superbly trained eye from near and far. It makes me want to rush outside and debauch myself on color and light.
Of scents, sounds, flavors, touches, and sights we construct our selves. It is a lifetime project, using the five senses to distinguish ourselves from the buzzing, blooming confusion of the world, until we are able to say with confidence, “This is me.” From little bits of the perceived world, sifted and sorted by the brain, we define a boundary between “me” and “the rest.”
It is a leaky boundary, thank God, pricked with five senses, permeable to physical sensation and to wonder, allowing the soul to flow in and out from world to self and back again.
