Books › The spell of the sensuous
The spell of the sensuous
First published 1996 · 352 pages
A philosophical and poetic reawakening of the senses that invites you to converse with the living, breathing earth.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like stepping out of a sterile room and into a dense, breathing forest. It is a leisurely, deeply contemplative journey that asks you to slow down and re-inhabit your own body. The prose is both philosophically rigorous and intensely lyrical, weaving phenomenology with indigenous wisdom and the author's own experiences as a magician. You are enveloped in an earthy, expansive mood that gradually dissolves the boundary between the human mind and the more-than-human world. It moves from a quiet diagnosis of our modern sensory alienation to a profound, awe-inspiring re-enchantment with the earth. This is a transformative read for anyone who yearns to heal their disconnect from nature and experience language not as a human invention, but as an echo of the wild.
- Mood
- earthy
- contemplative
- expansive
- awe-inspiring
- Tone
- reverent
- philosophical
- earnest
- lyrical
- Pace
- leisurely
- Themes
- the animate earth · sensory reawakening · origins of language · human-nature entanglement · phenomenology of the body
- The writing
- Lyrical, dense, and deeply sensory, weaving rigorous philosophical inquiry with poetic nature writing.
- The arc
- Moves from a quiet diagnosis of modern sensory alienation to a profound, grounded re-enchantment with the living world.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave a deep, intellectual, and spiritual reconnection with nature, and who enjoy blending philosophy with environmentalism.
Content notes
- ecological grief
About the book
[In this book, the author] draws on sources as diverse as the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Balinese shamanism, Apache storytelling, and his own experience as an accomplished sleight-of-hand magician to reveal the subtle dependence of human cognition on the natural environment. He explores the character of perception and excavates the sensual foundations of language, which - even at its most abstract - echoes the calls and cries of the earth.
Description from Open Library.
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