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- As an example, consider the case of someone who has only lived where light pollution obscures all but a few of the brightest stars. Under these conditions they may have good reason to believe that there’s not much to the night sky. Of course, the problem is not that reality is impoverished, rather it’t that they can no longer see it. I’d suggest that this pattern recurs throughout our experience. For a host of reasons, mostly having to do with the way we have structured the human-built world and the habits of perception fostered by modern media, it is hard to see what is right before us all the time. As Ivan Illich once put it, “Existence in a society that has become a system finds the senses useless precisely because of the very instruments designed for their extension.”
- “[O]ur human and earthly limits, properly understood,” Wendell Berry has argued, “are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning. Perhaps our most serious cultural loss in recent centuries is the knowledge that some things, though limited, are inexhaustible. For example, an ecosystem, even that of a working forest or farm, so long as it remains ecologically intact, is inexhaustible. A small place, as I know from my own experience, can provide opportunities of work and learning, and a fund of beauty, solace, and pleasure — in addition to its difficulties — that cannot be exhausted in a lifetime or in generations.”
- It was recently suggested to me, in a discussion about embodiment and perception, that the phrase “come back to your senses” seemed rather loaded with significance As with the idea of “common sense,” we’ve taken coming back to your senses to mean something vaguely intellectual. But what if we took it literally? What if staying sane meant doing a better job of anchoring our experience to our senses?
Or, as Illich put it in lines I’ve cited here on more than one occasion, “Therefore, it appears to me that we cannot neglect the disciplined recovery, an asceticism, of a sensual praxis in a society of technogenic mirages. This reclaiming of the senses, this promptitude to obey experience […] seems to me to be the fundamental condition for renouncing that technique which sets up a definitive obstacle to friendship.”