Seven Sins For A Life Worth Living

ONE: The Pleasure of All Five Senses We can see farther today than any of our forefathers could dream of seeing. We can see farther than the keenest cheetah or lynx. We can look over the horizon, around the world, up into space, down into our intestines digesting dinner. Nothing can escape our eye. We can watch practically anything we wantthe only thing is, most of what we look at comes down a cable. Using the naked eye is fast going out of style. Why bother when a camera will do it better? The image is becoming more real to us than the real thing. There is a man in England who does his bird watching in front of the television. He doesn't need binoculars. He will watch the golf tournaments for the chance flight of a heron across the green. He will watch nature programs, not for the lion strutting in the foreground, but for the little bird in the background that the commentator neglects even to mention. His greatest thrill is to identify a bird on his screen and check it off his list as "seen." Not just our eyes, but all of our senses are losing the original savor of first-hand experience. We live in an ocean of smell but smother it in detergents, disinfectants, and artificial perfumes. Millions wear little white earphones and hear only faintly the sounds of the living world they are passing through. We are becoming out of touch with the earth we live on, and fast. We need to come to our senses before we lose them. This physical life is to die for. When we stop for a moment to register how alive everything isevery cell of our own body, every turning leaf, every drop of rainwe can begin to catch on to the fact that all of Nature is sensual by nature. One way this came home to me was, of all things, from the lick of a Jersey cow. She had idled over to me at the gate of a field on the edge of the Cotswolds in England. Her slab of a tongue, hot with a steamy, grassy breath, curled out and began rasping across the back of my hand on the gate. That slow, grating rub, like a worn kitchen scourer, heaved itself lazily over my flesh with an undeniable empathy of beast to man. Less sloppy than a dog, slower of pace, more casual altogether than any animal I can think of, that Jersey cow had the time of day for me, or for anyone who cared to lean over the gate and offer their salt; for it was that she was after, however much my sentiments might have liked it to be otherwise. It may sound strange, but that lick from a Jersey cow was erotic. The word has come to have an almost exclusively sexual connotation, but being moved and touched is always at the heart of what it means to be erotic: to be in a living, felt relationship with life, with all our senses and intelligence. In the Greek myth, where Psyche is another name for the human soul, Pleasure was the child of Psyche and Eros. Pleasure, then, is the result of the passage of Eros. It is an erotic response to life, one that is physically moving. The body shudders, quivers, and trembles with pleasure in striking some chord with the world around it. That's one of the many good things about having a bodyyou can be moved and touched by, literally be in touch with, other bodies. We all love to touch and be touched, not least because it brings us to earth, to our own ground, and to the common ground we share with others. Touch is the primary human experience. It is the first sense to develop; babies can die if they are not held, and their cries are often for touch as much as for food. My wife's most cherished memory is of holding her newborn child and smelling the top of its head. As children we are always in touch, having our hands in everything. We squeeze mud between our fingers, play with sand, pick up worms; even as adHousden, Roger is the author of 'Seven Sins For A Life Worth Living ', published 2005 under ISBN 9780307336712 and ISBN 0307336719.