BOOKS

The Spell of the Sensuous

Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

Winner of the International Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.

For a thousand generations, human beings viewed themselves as part of the wider community of nature, and they carried on active relationships not only with other people but with other animals, plants, and natural objects (including mountains, rivers, winds, and weather patterns) that we have only lately come to think of as "inanimate". How, then, did humans come to sever their ancient reciprocity with the natural world? What will it take for us to recover a sustaining relationship with the breathing earth?

In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram 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. In this lyrical work, Abram weaves his arguments with a passion, a precision, and an intellectual daring that recall such writers as Loren Eisleley, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez.

 

"The Spell of the Sensuous is a book of rare brilliance and huge influence, that has now shaped the thought of a generation of readers. Its combination of rigor of thought, openness to wonder, and generosity of spirit is unique. I fell first under its spell fifteen years ago, and it has been foundational to my writing and teaching ever since - as well as to my everyday experience of being in the world. Today, surely more than ever, as the Anthropocene shadow lengthens and darkens, we need the hope and vision of this remarkable work."

                       – Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland and The Lost Words

“A masterpiece – combining poetic passion with intellectual rigor and daring. Electric with energy, it offers us a new approach to scholarly inquiry: as a fully embodied human animal. It opens pathways and vistas that will be fruitfully explored for years, indeed for generations, to come.”

               – Joanna Macy, Buddhist teacher and activist, author of Active Hope

SOS reviews

“This book by David Abram lights up the landscape of language, flesh, mind, history, mapping us back into the world.”

—Gary Snyder, author of Mountains and Rivers Without End

“A masterpiece—combining poetic passion with intellectual rigor and daring. Electric with energy, it offers us a new approach to scholarly inquiry: as a fully embodied human animal. It opens pathways and vistas that will be fruitfully explored for years, indeed for generations, to come.”

—Joanna Macy, translator of Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Book of Hours

“This is a major work of research and intuitive brilliance, an archive of clear ideas. At the end of our century of precarious ecology, The Spell of the Sensuous strikes the deepest notes of celebration and alertness—an indispensable book!”

—Howard Norman, author of The Bird Artist

“Abram manages, almost magically, to stir in us a long-lost memory: deep in our bones, in our blood, in the air we breathe, we know that the world lives and speaks to us.… He shows that it is possible to reawaken the animistic dimension of perception and feeling without renouncing rationality and intellectual analysis.… A joy to read and a brilliant gift to our rapidly darkening world.”

—Shambhala Sun

“This is a landmark book. Scholars will doubtless recognize its brilliance, but they may overlook the most important part of Abram’s achievement: he has written the best instruction manual yet for becoming fully human. I walked outside when I was done and the world was a different place.”

—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

“Abram’s Spell must be praised. It’s so well done, well written, well thought. I know of no work more valuable for shifting our thinking and feeling about the place of humans in the world.”

—James Hillman, author of The Soul’s Code

“Forges a thoroughly articulate passage between science and mysticism.… Speculative, learned, and always ‘lucid and precise’ as the eye of the vulture that confronted him once on a cliff ledge, Abram has one of those rare minds which, like the mind of a musician or a great mathematician, fuses dreaminess with smarts.”

—Village Voice Literary Supplement

 

“Prose as lush as a moss-draped rain forest and as luminous as a high desert night. Deeply resonant with indigenous ways of knowing, Becoming Animal reminds us of the porosity of the boundary between ourselves and the more-than-human world. Abram lets us listen in on wordless conversations with ancient boulders, walruses, birds, and roof beams. His profound recognition of intelligences other than our own enables us to enter into reciprocal symbioses that can in turn, sustain the world. Becoming Animal illuminates a way forward in restoring relationship with the earth, led by our vibrant animal beings to re-inhabit the glittering world.”

            — Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass

David Abram returns with a startling exploration of our human entanglement with the rest of nature.

As the climate veers toward catastrophe, the innumerable losses cascading through the biosphere make vividly evident the need for a metamorphosis in our relation to the living land. For too long we’ve ignored the wild intelligence of our bodies, taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance.

Abram’s writing subverts this distance, drawing readers ever closer to their animal senses in order to explore, from within, the elemental kinship between the human body and the breathing Earth. The shape-shifting of ravens, the erotic nature of gravity, the eloquence of thunder, the pleasures of being edible: all have their place in this book.

 “This book is like a prehistoric cave. If you have the nerve to enter it and you get used to the dark, you'll discover things about storytelling which are startling, urgent and deeply true. Things each of us once knew, but forgot when we were aborn into the 19th and 20th centuries. Extraordinary rediscoveries!” —John Berger, author of Ways of Seeing

“One of the most compelling and important ecology books in decades… Abram has given us another classic that will help us ponder our future and choose our actions wisely.” —Rex Weyler, co-founder of Greenpeace, author of Greenpeace The Inside Story

In Becoming Animal, David Abram has crafted the rarest of literary gems: a sublime effort combining transcendent prose, lucid insight, and lasting consequence. —Shambhala Sun

“Without doubt one of America’s greatest nature writers, one who ably follows in the footsteps of Muir, Thoreau and Leopold. . .The language is luminous, the style hypnotic. Abram weaves a spell that brings the world alive…” —Resurgence

“Speculative, learned, and always ‘lucid and precise’ as the eye of the vulture that confronted him once on a cliff ledge, Abram has one of those rare minds which, like the mind of a musician or a great mathematician, fuses dreaminess with smarts.” —The Village Voice